The Blue Castle. L.M. Montgomery

CHAPTER XLIII

       CHAPTER XLIV

       CHAPTER XLV

THE BLUE CASTLE INTRODUCTION

      By 1926, when The Blue Castle appeared in print for the first time, Lucy Maud Montgomery had already published several books and established herself as a successful author. In 1908, L.C. Page of Boston had published her first novel, the famous Anne of Green Gables, which, within a year of appearing, had gone through six editions and had sold 19, 000 copies.¹ Throughout her life, she published consistently and prodigiously, producing hundreds of short stories and poems. Her second novel, Anne of Avonlea appeared in 1909, followed by Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), The Story Girl (1911), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), The Golden Road (1913), the third novel in the Anne series, Anne of the Island (1915), The Watchman and Other Poems (1916), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), an autobiographical piece, The Alpine Path (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Rilla of Ingleside (1920), and the first two novels of a three-part series: Emily of New Moon (1923) and Emily Climbs (1925). Then, wishing to go off in a new direction and perhaps, unbeknownst to her, looking for an outlet for her personal life experiences, Montgomery wrote The Blue Castle.

      Up until this point, writing had always been extremely important to Montgomery, not only as a career, but as an outlet through which she could record the enormous personal difficulties she faced. In fact, Montgomery first began recording her thoughts and feelings in a journal when she was sixteen — a practice she maintained for the rest of her life. Her journals and letters to her long-time correspondents, Ephraim Weber of Alberta, and George Boyd MacMillan of Scotland, ² record Montgomery’s transformation from a young, lonely girl to a celebrated author who was voted, in a 1999 CBC millennium poll, the most influential Canadian writer of the twentieth century, and in 2000 was pronounced, by Maclean’s magazine, to be one of twenty-five Canadians who inspired the world.³

      Success did not come easily for Montgomery, however. She was deprived of a mother at the age of two, abandoned by her father, and left to grow up with, and later take care of, two very conservative, elderly grandparents. She trained to become a teacher and taught at Bideford, Belmont, and Lower Bedeque, P.E.I., before attending Dalhousie University for a year and working as a copy editor for the Daily Echo in Halifax. She became engaged to Edwin Simpson, a Baptist theological student, but shortly after fell deeply in love with a young farmer, Herman Leard, causing her to break her engagement. Despite her strong feelings for Leard, she believed she could not marry him because of their differences in class and background and so, with great pain and remorse, she rejected his attentions. Shortly after, Montgomery became engaged to the Reverend Ewan Macdonald, with whom she began a very troubled marriage in 1911.

      The couple lived in Leaskdale, Ontario (60 miles northeast of Toronto), where Macdonald had accepted a ministry, and their first son, Chester Cameron, was born in 1912. In the following four years, as she continued to adjust to the role of minister’s wife, Montgomery experienced a difficult second pregnancy and had another son, Hugh Alexander, who died at birth. A year later, Montgomery’s last child, Ewan Stuart, was born.

      In addition to the death of her second son, Montgomery experienced several losses during these years, including that of Herman Leard (1899), her father (1900), and her grandmother (1911). In 1919, Montgomery was devastated by the sudden death of her cousin, Frede Campbell, and only a few years later (1924), her beloved aunt, Annie Macneill Campbell, also died.

      All through this, as she continued to write, Montgomery had to come to terms with her husband’s declining mental health. In addition to suffering recurring delusions and bouts of deep clinical depression, which led to a series of nervous breakdowns, Macdonald lived with the conviction that he was predestined to be damned to eternal hellfire. While he managed to keep working as a minister, it fell to Montgomery not only to care for her husband, but to disguise his condition and maintain a façade of stability and happiness for their children and the congregation.

      On a more pragmatic level, during these years Montgomery was also participating in a legal battle with L.C.Page, first, for withholding royalties, and second, for publishing a revised collection of her early short stories without her authorization, a case she won in 1923. Her husband was also involved in a legal contest over a car accident, which he lost. In addition, both he and Montgomery were working to convince their congregation to vote against the union of the Presbyterian and Methodist churches.

      Shaped by these events, suffering ill health, devastated by the outbreak of World War I, and experiencing increasing loneliness and misery in her marriage, Montgomery interrupted writing the third novel of her spirited Emily series to produce her first book aimed at an adult audience; it was The Blue Castle.

      Upon first reading, as many reviewers have pointed out, The Blue Castle is not convincing as a serious romance novel nor as an “amusing ... little comedy.” ⁴ The book opens on Valancy Stirling’s twenty-ninth birthday as she comes to terms with being an “old maid.” Living with her bitter and closed-minded mother, and constantly ridiculed by her extended family, Valancy realizes that she has had no life and has nothing to look forward to. As a result, she needs little convincing, when told by a doctor that she has only a year or so left to live due to her heart condition, to break free from all those who victimize her in order to pursue happiness. That entails shunning social conventions and moving in with the town’s outcasts, alcoholic Roaring Abel and his daughter, Cissy, an unmarried mother whose illegitimate child survived for only a year after its birth. At the same time, determined to experience marriage and sexual gratification, she proposes to Barney Snaith, whose mysterious background has everyone in town convinced he is a convict or worse.

      What makes the novel appear unsuccessful is the way in which Valancy changes her personality so suddenly when she discovers the terminal nature of her illness, and the way in which all of the pieces of the novel are so neatly resolved at the end. After Snaith spirits Valancy away to his island in Muskoka, which resembles the castle of Valancy’s dreams, they fall in love. Snaith is revealed to be Valancy’s favourite author, John Foster, who is, of course, also heir to a great fortune. Eventually Valancy discovers that her heart condition is not fatal, which ultimately clears the way for the couple to live happily ever after. It is all too simple — and therefore suspicious — especially coming from such a serious and ambitious author as Montgomery. Over the years, then, it is understandable why critics have either ignored the work or given it tepid reviews. Furthermore, the fact that it doesn’t fit into the genre of children’s books, by which Montgomery had established her career to date, seems to have confused reviewers.

      One of the first reviews to appear was in Punch (1926), which immediately established The Blue Castle as “sentimental fiction.” On September 18, 1926, The Saturday Review of Literature warns, “The imaginative reader may suspect that Valancy’s malady will not prove fatal, that in revolt she will tardily ripen and thrive, win the man of her heart to belated mating, and live happily ever after. But all these foregone eventualities are gracefully unfolded, with not a little broad humor and a merciful restraint. The story is, of course, one exclusively for feminine readers.”

      The New York Times Book Review, September 26, 1926, reports that Montgomery’s new book, “Although perhaps a little more mature in its spirit than the earlier books, is unmistakably from first page to last an L.M. Montgomery novel, compact of sentiment, rosily trimmed with romance, peopled with beings drawn solely out of the imagination, but telling a well-made story with humor and pathos.” ⁵ Both The Times Literary Supplement⁶ and The Canadian Bookman7print reviews that interpret Valancy Stirling as a Cinderella figure. The latter goes so far as to say “there is a certain pettiness that puts us out of sympathy with the character of Valancy, the verbal lengths to which she goes in her rebellion seeming rather illogical. Within its limits, however, the novel is not below the ordinary fare.”

      Despite these reviews, over the next several decadesThe Blue Castle seems almost to disappear from