
I missed out on Lucy Maud Montgomery when I was a child, but happily discovered her a few years ago and gobbled up a number of her novels with great delight. I even wrote a short biography of her for Shiny. But I hadn't encountered this, which is actually one of the few novels she wrote for adults. I read about it recently on someone's blog and knew I had to read it.
The Blue Castle is the story of Valancy Stirling, who is 29 and living with her controlling mother and first cousin, in a dull house in a small town. Everyone in her large extended family looks down on Valancy and makes her life miserable. She has been relegated to 'hopeless old maidenhood', and more than one of her appalling uncles never ceases to make hurtful jokes about the fact. But, despite her unremarkable appearance and shrinking manner
Valancy herself had never relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed little hope that Romance would come her way yet - never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine, and unsought by any man.
But Valancy, 'so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life, was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams'. For she has created for herself a beautiful imaginary place to which she can retreat in secret - the Blue Castle. Here she lives in comfort and luxury with her adoring lover, whose appearance and character have naturally changed over the years since she first dreamed him up more than half a lifetime ago. Her only comfort apart from this is the books she gets from the library by one John Foster, who writes with exquisite perceptiveness about the natural world of which Valancy herself is so fond.
On this miserable morning when, to her relief a family picnic has been called off due to the weather, Valancy decides to visit the local doctor, to discover once and for all the cause of the frightening pains she often suffers from in her heart. As she fears, the diagnosis is terminal - she has only a year at most to live. This news, which she does not share with the family, precipitates her into taking drastic action. She announces that she is going to move out, and to care for a young girl who is dying of TB. Cissy Gay lives with her charming but wholly disreputable father, Roaring Abel, and has been ostracised by the community because she gave birth to an illegitimate child, which sadly died in infancy.
The family is horrified by Valancy's decision, but living with the Gays is exactly the kind of life Valancy has always craved - she enjoys the freedom, the absence of the judgmental treatment she has had all her life, and starts to change her own habits, spending some of her savings on a new, pretty dress. She also begins a friendship with Abel's friend Barney Snaith, who lives in a house on a nearby island and is disliked and feared by the town inhabitants who believe, with no evidence, that he is a criminal. But Valancy likes him very much, and when Cissy dies, instead of moving back home as the family expects, she tells Barney of her short life expectancy and asks him to marry her, even though she knows he doesn't love her.
Life on the island is everything Valancy has ever wanted. She and Barney get along extremely well, and her health and looks start to improve immeasurably. But just as her allotted year is drawing to an end, something happens to shatter the dream of happiness she has been living, and soon she is facing a miserable return to the life she left behind. Can things possibly end happily for her?
Well, you probably can guess that there's going to be a happy ending. I was pretty sure there must be, but there were still a couple of twists I didn't see coming, and despite my optimism I found myself whizzing through the final pages hoping like mad that I was right.
I'm so happy to have discovered this novel. It gave me hours of intense pleasure. Yes, on one level you could call it an escapist fantasy, but though Montgomery writes in her usual, beautifully simple prose, and though there's more than an element of wish-fulfilment here, the novel never stretches your credulity. Valancy's anguish at her desperately unhappy home life and the miserable future that stretches ahead of her, 'a solitary little withered leaf on a wintry bough', is something that must echo the feelings of lonely single women of any era including the present, and her slow blossoming - which clearly includes, though never spelled out, her discovery of her own sexuality - is beautifully conveyed. I loved every minute and was really sorry to finish.
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