Author Description

The Blue Castle L. M. Montgomery’s Hidden Masterpiece of Courage & Romance “If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you’ll never be…” 1926. Valancy Stirling is twenty-nine, unmarried, and trapped in the suffocating grip of her small-town Ontario family. Plain, timid, and mercilessly bullied, she has spent her life obeying rules, swallowing insults, and dreaming in secret of a fairy-tale “Blue Castle” where she is finally free. Then a doctor’s letter changes everything: Valancy has less than a year to live. Overnight the mouse roars. She walks out on her horrified relatives, says exactly what she thinks, takes a job nursing a dying outcast, and — in the most delicious scandal of the decade — proposes marriage to the town’s mysterious recluse, Barney Snaith. Suddenly Valancy is living more in twelve months than she has in her entire life: moonlit lakes, wild forests, midnight picnics, and a love she never dared hope for. But the diagnosis was wrong. When Valancy discovers she is perfectly healthy, she must decide: return to the cage of respectability… or fight for the wild, beautiful life she has only just tasted? L. M. Montgomery, beloved for Anne of Green Gables, called The Blue Castle her personal favourite. Written when she herself was battling depression and marital unhappiness, it is her only novel set outside Prince Edward Island and her only book written entirely for adults. Funny, fierce, and unexpectedly sensual, it is a love letter to every woman who has ever been told to “know her place.” Nearly a century later, readers still fall in love with Valancy’s glorious rebellion and the tender, slow-burn romance that proves it’s never too late to choose yourself. “Fear is the original sin,” Valancy said. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.”