The Blue Castle

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and spent most of her life in a complicated relationship with a place she both loved and needed to escape. Her mother died before she turned two. Her father left for the mainland and eventually remarried. She was raised by strict, emotionally reserved grandparents in Cavendish, a childhood that gave her the material for her most famous character and left marks she never entirely resolved.

She began publishing poetry and short fiction in her teens and spent years grinding out stories for magazines while working as a schoolteacher and, later, caring for her aging grandmother. Anne of Green Gables was rejected five times before a publisher accepted it in 1908. It made Montgomery famous almost overnight, which turned out to be its own kind of trap: she spent the next three decades writing sequels and Anne-adjacent novels to satisfy a public that had decided what she was for.

The Blue Castle, published in 1926, is the book she wrote for herself. It is her only novel set entirely outside Prince Edward Island, set instead in the Muskoka region of Ontario, and its heroine is Montgomery's shadow self: a woman in her late twenties who has spent her entire life performing obedience and invisibility, and who finally stops. Montgomery was in her early fifties when she wrote it, in a marriage to a minister she had little love for, managing his depression and the expectations of a congregation while writing fiction in secret.

She died in 1942. The official cause was heart disease. Montgomery's biographers have suggested the circumstances were more complicated. She had written in her journals for years about exhaustion, despair, and the gap between the life she performed and the one she actually had. The Blue Castle was the version where the woman gets out.