Reframe · No. 45
The Blue Castle is not a reward for a death sentence. Montgomery wrote the wrong letter.
Most readers arrive with the payout already counted: a year to live, a brave exit, and a secret millionaire as the prize. That is the popular summary. It is not what L. M. Montgomery put on the page.
The fatal letter belonged to Jane Sterling. Valancy leaves the pearls, locks the house, and rows to the mainland.
What most readers assume
“A woman told she will die within a year throws off her family, lives at last, and is rewarded with a secret millionaire and the cottage she had only imagined.”
What L. M. Montgomery actually stages
Most readers arrive with the prize already paid: a plain woman is told she has a year, she finally lives, and the hermit turns out to be rich. Montgomery published the novel in 1926. Valancy Stirling is twenty-nine in Deerwood. Dr Trent's letter names angina and a year. She proposes at a garden gate. The letter was meant for old Miss Jane Sterling. The pearls cost fifteen thousand dollars. She locks the shack and rows away.
The Blue Castle · L. M. Montgomery
The popular summary sells a death sentence that pays out in a millionaire. The novel sells Valancy locking the shack and leaving the pearls.
Common Questions
Search questions this reframe installment answers about The Blue Castle.
Is The Blue Castle a story about a woman given a year to live?
The letter says that, and she believes it. Dr Trent writes that Valancy has angina pectoris in the last stages, complicated with an aneurism, and that she might not live longer than a year. She tells nobody and spends the next year on that sentence. In chapter 37 he reads the letter and says it was meant for old Miss Jane Sterling of Port Lawrence. Valancy had pseudo-angina, which is not fatal. Miss Sterling, who received the reassuring letter, died in her sleep two months later.
Does living bravely earn Valancy the happy ending?
No. When she learns she is not dying, she does not keep the cottage as wages. She writes that she did not mean to trick Barney, offers to help with a divorce, leaves the pearl necklace because it cost fifteen thousand dollars, feeds the cats, locks the house, and rows to the mainland. He comes to the Stirling parlour afterwards and says he loves her. The reunion follows a departure she has already made.
Who is Barney Snaith?
Deerwood's version is a man to avoid, living alone on Mistawis. He is the one who still brings oranges to Cissy Gay after the town has written her off. After the mixed letters, his father arrives asking for Mr Redfern's house: Barney is Bernard Snaith Redfern, son of the patent-medicine fortune. The room he told her not to enter holds galley proofs of Wild Honey by John Foster, the nature writer she has been reading in the Deerwood library. Both names arrive on the day she decides to leave.
Why does Valancy propose to Barney?
The day after Cissy Gay's funeral she is at the garden gate when he asks if there is anything he can do. She says yes: will he marry her. She has Dr Trent's letter. He is silent, then says he is not in love with her and never thought of being in love, but that he has always thought her a bit of a dear. The wedding is in a shabby parlour in Port Lawrence, with no guests. On the island she calls the pine shack her Blue Castle, and he kisses her then.
What happens at the railroad tracks?
One June evening her heel catches in a switch as a through train comes around the curve. Barney cuts the lace and drags her clear. They sit shaking on the station bench. She remembers the warning that excitement could kill her, and she is still alive. That is the first crack in the diagnosis, before she goes back to Trent in Port Lawrence and makes him read the letter.
Do Valancy and Barney stay in the Blue Castle?
The last chapter is a farewell, not a settling-in. On a cool September dusk they stop under the mainland pines and look back at Mistawis. Good Luck and Banjo go to Cousin Georgiana. Barney calls her Moonlight, promises they will return next summer, and calls the trip ahead a real honeymoon. The shack stays where she became herself. They drive away from it.