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118 pages

English

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Description

From the author of Anne of Green Gables, comes a heart-warming tale of courage and romance. Follow 29-year-old Valency as she breaks free from the confines of her strict family and sets out to discover a new world of possibility.

Valency has spent her entire life with her head down, trying to please her overbearing mother. At 29-years-old, she’s never been in love and has resigned herself to a life as an old maid. The only escape Valency has is within the books of her favourite author, John Foster, and she takes comfort in her dreams of the blue castle he so vividly describes. But after discovering that she has a terminal heart condition, she decides to change her fate.

Will Valency be able to free herself from her family’s clutches? Will she ever find happiness and true love?

With themes of hope, inner strength, romance and pioneering feminism, The Blue Castle is a charming tale that is sure to touch your heart.

Read & Co. Books is proud to have republished this classic novel in a beautiful new edition, now complete with a specially-commissioned author biography. The perfect read for those who grew up with the Anne of Green Gables books and now want to bring Lucy Maud Montgomery’s delightful writing into their adulthoods.

Sujets

Romance

Suspense

Fiction

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Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	24 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781473373938
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE BLUE CASTLE
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents
Lucy Maud Montgomery
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
CHAPTER XLII
CHAPTER XLIII
CHAPTER XLIV
CHAPTER XLV

Lucy Maud Montgomery
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on 30th November 1874, on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her mother, Clara Woolner (Macneil), died before Lucy reached the age of two and so she was raised by her maternal grandparents in a family of wealthy Scottish immigrants. The Family were deeply rooted in the development of the island, having arrived there in the 1770’s, and both Lucy’s grandfather and great grandfather had been figures in the province’s governance.
As a young girl, Montgomery had a very privileged upbringing. Due to the family’s wealth, she had access to a greater number of books than was usual in this era. These resources, coupled with the family’s Scottish traditions of oral storytelling, gave her a taste for literature.
Montgomery took a teacher’s degree at Charlottetown’s Prince of Wales College before beginning work at a rural school to raise funds for and additional year at Dalhousie University. She continued to teach for a couple of years until her income from writing enabled her to become a full-time author. She then moved back home to live with her grandmother. In 1908, Montgomery produced her first full-length novel, titled Anne of Green Gables . It was an instant success and, following it up with several sequels, Montgomery became a regular on the best-seller list and an international household name.
In 1911 she married Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, following the death of her grandmother. They had two sons together but the marriage was fraught with difficulties. Ewan had a severe mental disorder that frequently left him incapacitated, seriously hampering his career and eventually forcing him to resign from the ministry in 1935. The couple retired to Toronto and resided there together until Montgomery’s death on 24th April 1942.

CHAPTER I
If it had not rained on a certain May morning Valancy Stirling’s whole life would have been entirely different. She would have gone, with the rest of her clan, to Aunt Wellington’s engagement picnic and Dr. Trent would have gone to Montreal. But it did rain and you shall hear what happened to her because of it.
Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.
Deerwood and the Stirlings had long since relegated Valancy to hopeless old maidenhood. But Valancy herself had never quite relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance would come her way yet—never, until this wet, horrible morning, when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought by any man.
Ay, there lay the sting. Valancy did not mind so much being an old maid. After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn’t possibly be as dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellington or an Uncle Benjamin, or even an Uncle Herbert. What hurt her was that she had never had a chance to be anything but an old maid. No man had ever desired her.
The tears came into her eyes as she lay there alone in the faintly greying darkness. She dared not let herself cry as hard as she wanted to, for two reasons. She was afraid that crying might bring on another attack of that pain around the heart. She had had a spell of it after she had got into bed—rather worse than any she had had yet. And she was afraid her mother would notice her red eyes at breakfast and keep at her with minute, persistent, mosquito-like questions regarding the cause thereof.
“Suppose,” thought Valancy with a ghastly grin, “I answered with the plain truth, ‘I am crying because I cannot get married.’ How horrified Mother would be—though she is ashamed every day of her life of her old maid daughter.”
But of course appearances should be kept up. “It is not,” Valancy could hear her mother’s prim, dictatorial voice asserting, “it is not maidenly to think about men.”
The thought of her mother’s expression made Valancy laugh—for she had a sense of humour nobody in her clan suspected. For that matter, there were a good many things about Valancy that nobody suspected. But her laughter was very superficial and presently she lay there, a huddled, futile little figure, listening to the rain pouring down outside and watching, with a sick distaste, the chill, merciless light creeping into her ugly, sordid room.
She knew the ugliness of that room by heart—knew it and hated it. The yellow-painted floor, with one hideous, “hooked” rug by the bed, with a grotesque, “hooked” dog on it, always grinning at her when she awoke; the faded, dark-red paper; the ceiling discoloured by old leaks and crossed by cracks; the narrow, pinched little washstand; the brown-paper lambrequin with purple roses on it; the spotted old looking-glass with the crack across it, propped up on the inadequate dressing-table; the jar of ancient potpourri made by her mother in her mythical honeymoon; the shell-covered box, with one burst corner, which Cousin Stickles had made in her equally mythical girlhood; the beaded pincushion with half its bead fringe gone; the one stiff, yellow chair; the faded old motto, “Gone but not forgotten,” worked in coloured yarns about Great-grandmother Stirling’s grim old face; the old photographs of ancient relatives long banished from the rooms below. There were only two pictures that were not of relatives. One, an old chromo of a puppy sitting on a rainy doorstep. That picture always made Valancy unhappy. That forlorn little dog crouched on the doorstep in the driving rain! Why didn’t some one open the door and let him in? The other picture was a faded, passe-partouted engraving of Queen Louise coming down a stairway, which Aunt Wellington had lavishly given her on her tenth birthday. For nineteen years she had looked at it and hated it, beautiful, smug, self-satisfied Queen Louise. But she never dared destroy it or remove it. Mother and Cousin Stickles would have been aghast, or, as Valancy irreverently expressed it in her thoughts, would have had a fit.
Every room in the house was ugly, of course. But downstairs appearances were kept up somewhat. There was no money for rooms nobody ever saw. Valancy sometimes felt that she could have done something for her room herself, even without money, if she were permitted. But her mother had negatived every timid suggestion and Valancy did not persist. Valancy never persisted. She was afraid to. Her mother could not brook opposition. Mrs. Stirling would sulk for days if offended, with the airs of an insulted duchess.
The only thing Valancy liked about her room was that she could be alone there at night to cry if she wanted to.
But, after all, what did it matter if a room, which you used for nothing except sleeping and dressing in, were ugly? Valancy was never permitted to stay alone in her room for any other purpose. People who wanted to be alone, so Mrs. Frederick Stirling and Cousin Stickles believed, could only want to be alone for some sinister purpose. But her room in the Blue Castle was everything a room should be.
Valancy, so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life, was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams. Nobody in the Stirling clan, or its ramifications, suspected this, least of all her mother and Cousin Stickles. They never knew that Valancy had two homes—the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women—herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night. Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle.
For one thing she had quite a few lovers in it. Oh, only one at a time. One who wooed her with all the r