The Prison of Other People's Expectations — The Blue Castle

Rain on the morning of her twenty-ninth birthday cancels the Stirling clan picnic and leaves Valancy alone with a truth she has dodged for years: in Deerwood she is the homely, unwanted daughter, pitied as a failure because no man has ever desired her. She has also been reading John Foster's nature books at the library, finding in them a hint of a wider world barred to her.

She wakes before dawn in an ugly room she hates, inventories every scornful remark she would have endured at the picnic, and blesses the weather that spares her one more public humiliation. Her only private refuge is the Blue Castle, the fantasy kingdom where she is beautiful and loved, though this morning even that escape fails her. When chest pains and palpitations trouble her again, she decides to see Dr. Trent on her own, using money from the account her father left her and defying the Stirling rule that every medical decision requires a family council and Uncle James's approval.

She dreads the fuss her relatives would make if they knew, yet she chooses the disloyal doctor over the deep sea of clan advice. Montgomery opens the novel by showing a woman crushed by social expectation who is about to take her first unsanctioned step toward self-determination.