The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

The Blue Castle
By L.M. Mongomery

I don’t know why I happened to pick this book to read out of all L.M. Montgomery’s books (she of Anne of Green Gables fame). It’s probably because of the Blue in the title (my favorite color) and the Castle (who doesn’t love castles?) word in the title.

But the fact is I knew nothing about the book when I started reading it, but truly got caught up in the story and thoroughly enjoyed it.

My typical fare is fantasy and non-fiction, but I have been wanting to get back to some of the older books.

I’m lucky that I picked The Blue Castle first for my foray into yesteryear. The Blue Castle is written for grown-ups, definitely written on a more mature level than her other books.

The main character, Valancy, a single woman, was experiencing her 29th birthday. She was quite limited in her enjoyment of this fact because she lived with a repressive and controlling family. Her mother pretty much controlled Valancy’s every word and action. If Valancy were to protest, her mother would punish her by not speaking to her for several days.

It seems as if it would be easy to overcome all this and come out of one’s shell by age 29, but if one were continually exposed to this type of control from infancy onward, it would be like having invisible wires tying one down every where.

Valancy was only allowed to read a very few acceptable books from the library, and had little time to read them, because she was always expected to darn socks and do household duties during the evenings instead of choosing her own activities. No, she was not Cinderella; it was just that her whole family lived like this. There was no “scope for the imagination” as Anne of Green Gables would have said. Valancy even had to wrangle around and give explanations as to why she would even want to take the occasional walk to the library. At 29 years of age.

Valancy hated her room. Everything was the same as it had been for years. Montgomery described the room carefully, to me it didn’t sound so bad. I liked reading about the quaint objects, actually. But the point was that in her current state of mind, Valancy was not happy with anything, and the room symbolized that.

The characters and various family members were described in droll and interesting ways by showing the conservations they had with each other. Hypocrisies, snobberies, and idiosyncrasies were revealed in this way. It was quite funny and enjoyable to read these conversations.

But something happened to Valancy that changed everything. Or rather, changed her attitude to the point that everything SEEMED changed. What ensued was the hilarious releasing of the dam. Very fun to read. I was quite surprised at the pleasure I got out of reading this part of the book.

Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because I have a similar theme in my own life- that of learning to be myself under pressure. It’s odd that an old lady like myself should still have to be dealing with this, but I did identify to quite a degree with the repressed Valancy.

I hope you all get a chance to peruse this book, and possibly see Lucy Maud Montgomery’s work in a little bit of a different light.