One of my favourite childhood books turns 100 this year! Fortunately, I own three copies so I can celebrate in style. I acquired my first copy of L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle sometime in the 1980s. I can’t remember the exact moment I found it in our small-town Alberta thrift store, but I imagine it went something like this: Lucy Maud! And it’s not Anne or Emily! Ooh! Look at the cool cover!
My first copy most definitely has a cool cover. A Canadian Children’s Favourites edition produced by McClelland and Stewart in 1972, it has all the energy of its time: purple text on a green background with a fanciful blue castle, a Marimekko-esque forest, and a heroine whose long, slightly wavy hair flows across the cover with 1970s hippie abandon.
The Blue Castle isn’t a children’s book at all; in fact, it’s lauded as one of Montgomery’s only books for grownups. But grownups have often tossed it aside as well, arguing that it’s nothing more than a predictable, overdone romance. I suppose they’re right; on the surface it is a traditional hetero romance, complete with an ugly duckling heroine, a dashing if dastardly romantic hero, and a requisite consumptive fallen woman.
But for me, it’s always been more than a romance. The Blue Castle introduces readers to Valancy Stirling, a young woman doomed to a life of mousy spinsterhood under the thumb of her sour mother and wealthy and judgmental relatives. But Valancy subverts her family’s dour predictions. In a fit of abandon brought on by a misplaced medical diagnosis, she runs off with the local reprobate and takes control of her story, scraping together the dirt pile of her life and turning it into the castle of her dreams. Of course there’s a happily ever after; a romance can’t possibly exist without one. But as the 1972 cover suggests, this happily ever after is much more about Valancy finding herself than it is about the heterosexual romance plot.
I bought my second copy of The Blue Castle in St. John’s sometime in the late 2000s. It also came from a thrift store. This cover (McClelland-Bantam, 1988) emphasizes the romance. There’s an Impressionist-inspired scene featuring a stream with a wash of and white flowers along its banks, and in the background, a man and woman standing close together on a stone bridge. “Valancy found romance in her dreams,” the flap copy reads, “little dreaming they might come true…”. Blergh.
I justified my third copy – for yes, I do indeed own three copies of The Blue Castle – as an academic purchase. The Blue Castle: The Original Manuscript, edited by Carolyn Strom Collins and published by Nimbus in 2024, gives readers an inside look at Montgomery’s creative process, complete with deletions, insertions, and character name changes. And so, perhaps, it’s fitting that this cover features neither Valancy nor the romance plot, but rather, her creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery. If The Blue Castle is about claiming life on one’s own terms, then writing is what made that possible for Montgomery.
There’s only one other book that I own three copies of: Simone de Beauvoir’s monumental The Second Sex. Make of that what you will.
— Sonja Boon (she/her) is a mixed-race writer, researcher, and teacher currently living in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Her creative nonfiction and poetry appear in Riddle Fence, Room, Geist, Pinhole Poetry, and The Dalhousie Review, among others. Her memoir,
What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home, was published in 2019.
You can read Sonja Boon's essay "hear, here: fragments towards an imagined autobiography of my great-great-grandmother, indentured labourer, travelling from India to Suriname in 1873" in Issue 307 (Spring 2026). Order the issue now!
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