Reader’s Corner: The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery
October—with a gorgeous pageant of color around Mistawis into which Valancy plunged her soul. Never had she imagined anything so splendid. A great, tinted peace. Blue, wind-winnowed skies. Sunlight sleeping in the glades of that fairyland. Long dreamy purple days paddling idly in their canoe along shores and up the rivers of crimson and gold. A sleepy, red hunter’s moon. Enchanted tempests that stripped the leaves from the trees and heaped them along the shores. Flying shadows of clouds. What had all the smug, opulent lands out front to compare with this?
— L. M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
Characteristically idyllic and quaint, L. M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle is an awe-inspiring portrait of womanhood, independence, romance, and risk. The novel centres around Valency Stirling, a 29-year-old woman who has never been in love and who now sits in the house she shares with her family dreaming of her blue castle. Diagnosed with a fatal heart condition, she sets out determined to find that castle and live out her idealities in the final year of her life.
At its core, The Blue Castle explores the very essence of that life. This takes form in Montgomery’s robust and romantic writing, and in Valency as she learns to echo that same wealth of passion. Scenic, warm, and feminine, the novel creates a pocket of comfortable subliminality backed by a verdant island forest. The inescapable sadness of some end to this life never detracts from the overwhelming joy that stems from that touch of pure humanity granted to those willing to chase it.
Through her shy wit and tender spirit, Valency’s narration is filled with reverence, as she embraces the uncontrollable and makes the most of a seemingly indifferent world. Montgomery’s writing pushes against the perpetual mundanity of social passivity, opting instead for a selective eudaimonia echoed in Valency’s determinate love of the life she has left to live.