#the blue castle book club

[thestorycontinues]

So, I finished reading Montgomery's The Blue Castle. Now, I'm gonna read it again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

#the blue castle #l. m. montgomery #l m montgomery #this is an incredible book! #the blue castle book club

[fictionadventurer]

Before leaving home, Valancy looks down Lover's Lane and sees two types of relationships she's missed out on--lovers and female friends--and says she isn't sure which one she'd want most. So I love that she gets both. Instead of just running off to romance and marriage, she first gets to have the experience of female friendship with Cissy. I love that Montgomery recognizes that this is an equally important part of giving Valancy a full life.

#the blue castle #the blue castle book club #l.m. montgomery

[kehlana-wolhamonao3]

How I imagine the dress which made Barney call Valancy Moonlight :)

#blue castle book club #the blue castle book club #the blue castle

[dustpileofherown]

Considering another writing challenge over the summer.

#check the reblogs for the second poll!! #blue castle book club #lm montgomery #lmm lockdown #the blue castle book club #the blue castle #the blue castle fanfic #LMM fanfiction

[alwayschasingrainbows]

Ethel Traverse's engagement aesthetic.

She was like a diamond; beautiful, bright, shimmering, astonishing. And for the time being, I almost forgot... almost forgot that diamonds, aside from their undeniable beauty, are also cold, hard and sharp enough to cut glass.

"She was very beautiful. And I loved her. Oh, yes, I loved her. I won’t deny it or belittle it now. It was a lonely, romantic boy’s first passionate love, and it was very real. And I thought she loved me. I was fool enough to think that. I was wildly happy when she promised to marry me. For a few months. Then—I found out she didn’t."

(The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery)

The idea inspired by the fic by @no-where-new-hero.

#blue castle #blue castle book club #the blue castle #the blue castle book club #lm mongtomery #ethel traverse #blue castle spoilers #first quote is my invention

[autumnrose11]

Thinking about how absolutely crushing it must have been for Valancy to live with a mother like Mrs Frederick.

All the examples L.M. Montgomery gives us point clearly to emotional abuse. From the time she was little to when she’s a grown adult, 29 years old. Making her feel anything and everything that’s wrong with her is her own fault. Falling ill? Being “plain”? Relatives taking cruel jabs at her? It’s her own fault. (the dust pile incident!)

On the very, very rare occasions she dares protest, even in the mildest possible way, she punishes her by giving her the silent treatment. Basically.... if you have the nerve to defy me, I am going to isolate you until I see fit, because the way I treat you is also due to YOUR defiance.

She even says at one point that she would have preferred Valancy to be dead rather than run off with Barney Snaith. A friend of mine has a mother who said something along the same lines to her, and it reminded me forcefully of that experience of hers and how absolutely hellish it must have been to live through. (She’s doing much better now, thankfully, after moving away).

The worst part of these things in the book is that all of this - the silent treatment, the emotional withdrawal, the gaslighting... are so incredibly realistic.

I’ve read TBC twice, but the sheer scale of the cruelty and narcissism of this woman stuns me every time. In Jane of Lantern Hill, at least Robin loves her Jane. Mrs Frederick doesn’t. Valancy is always, always her scapegoat. Not the tiniest bit of concern or consciousness that that’s her DAUGHTER. She’s a monster. It’s sad that mothers like this do exist in the world, and all I can say is no one should have to live through that, much less 29 years of it :(( Hugs to Valancy.

#The Blue Castle #The Blue Castle book club #Mrs Frederick #Valancy Stirling #LM Montgomery #I loathe her with a passion

[the-moral-of-the-rose]

Another crossover...?

"Mr. Judson Parker is going to rent all the road fence of his farm to a patent medicine company to paint advertisements on.”[...] Anne was so worried that she didn’t sleep until nearly morning, and then she dreamed that the trustees had put a fence around the school and painted “Try Purple Pills” all over it."

Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery

Could it be... the beginning of Doctor Redfern's business, maybe?

"patent medicine is a proprietary medicine made and marketed under a patent and available without prescription." (Google definition). In The Blue Castle we are told that was the kind of medicine Dr. Redfern sold: "A girl friend of hers was asking her how she could stomach Doc. Redfern’s son and the patent-medicine background."

The "medicine advertisement" accident took place when Anne was seventeen, so around 1882. According to my own, very individual (although perhaps faulted) calculation, Barney Redfern (later: Barney Snaith) was born in 1877. (I explained why I think so in this post:

https://www.tumblr.com/the-moral-of-the-rose/745943769703202816/if-anybody-wanted-to-write-a-crossover-between?source=share

So, he'd be about five at this time.

And as far as we know: "I don’t remember Mother. Haven’t even a picture of her. She died when I was two years old. She was fifteen years younger than Father—a little school teacher. When she died Dad moved into Montreal and formed a company to sell his hair tonic. He’d dreamed the prescription one night, it seems. Well, it caught on. Money began to flow in. Dad invented—or dreamed—the other things, too—Pills, Bitters, Liniment and so on. He was a millionaire by the time I was ten, with a house so big a small chap like myself always felt lost in it."

The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery

So, Dr. Redfern's company existed during the time Anne of Avonlea took place! He was on his way to earn his first million! So, perhaps it was Barney's dad's advertisement that A. V. I. S. was so upset about!

#lm montgomery #anne of green gables #anne of avonlea #the blue castle #the blue castle book club spoilers #The blue castle book club #The blue castle spoilers #Scheduled post

[wistfulweaverwoman]

I should be working on my current wip, but instead I’m rereading The Blue Castle. Oops.

Now that I’m reading it a second time I’m picking up on even more foreshadowing.

In chapter 3 we learn that Valancy likes her name because she feels like it’s got an “outlandish tang”, as in otherworldly, like she belongs in the wilds.

A few paragraphs after she reads an excerpt from John Fosters book, Thistle Harvest, which foreshadows how he’ll come to love her:

“The woods are so human,” wrote John Foster, “that to know them one must live with them. An occasional saunter through them, keeping to the well-trodden paths, will never admit us to their intimacy. If we wish to be friends we must seek them out and win them by frequent, reverent visits at all hours; by morning, by noon, and by night; and at all seasons, in spring, in summer, in autumn, in winter. Otherwise we can never really know them and any pretence we may make to the contrary will never impose on them. They have their own effective way of keeping aliens at a distance and shutting their hearts to mere casual sightseers. It is of no use to seek the woods from any motive except sheer love of them; they will find us out at once and hide all their sweet, old-world secrets from us. But if they know we come to them because we love them they will be very kind to us and give us such treasures of beauty and delight as are not bought or sold in any market-place. For the woods, when they give at all, give unstintedly and hold nothing back from their true worshippers. We must go to them lovingly, humbly, patiently, watchfully, and we shall learn what poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervals, lying under starshine and sunset, what cadences of unearthly music are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir, what delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or on damp brooklands, what dreams and myths and legends of an older time haunt them. Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship.”

#so good #lm montgomery #the blue castle #the blue castle book club

[thestorycontinues]

"Valancy felt that she had done with laughter forever. And with tears, for that matter. She had no further use for either of them."

I'm never going to get over how well Montgomery wrote. To me, this suggests, "I may never be happy again-- but I'm not going to set myself up for more pain, either."

#the blue castle #the blue castle book club #l m montgomery #blue castle book club

[kerrymoncherrie]

#the blue castle #valancy stirling #lm montgomery #the blue castle book club #valarney #barney snaith #moodboard

[kehlana-wolhamonao3]

Polish cover of Blue Castle - I love that the artist clearly read the book!

#the blue castle book club #blue castle #blue castle book club #lucy maud montgomery

[dustpileofherown]

Coming this September…

Artwork thanks to @professionalfangrrl 💕

#the blue castle #valancy stirling #barney snaith #tbc #the blue castle fanart #the blue castle fanfic #the blue castle fanfiction #blue castle book club #the blue castle book club

[lemonluvgirl]

But honestly, Valency Stirling just wanting her own little dust pile really freaking spoke to me. And it made me feel in ways that I was not even aware I could be made to feel. Like that's all anybody really wants. Just their own thing. Whether it's a career, or a degree, or a family, or a partner, or just a freaking house in the woods where no one will bother you.

Human beings ultimately just want something to call their own. That's just for them. Big or small it doesn't matter. Whether you are a nerdy little nobody or an A-list celebrity.

At the end of the day, you want your dustpile. You need your dustpile. Because it's yours.

#the blue castle book club #the blue castle #i might be jumping ahead but #i just wanted to say this

[batrachised]

WE HAVE BARNEY'S FIRST APPEARANCE!! REPEAT: BARNEY'S FIRST APPEARANCE! screaming crying throwing up

I legitimately have typed out like a million drafts so far because there are simply too many things about this interaction that I love. I love every part of it, which means I could talk at length about its implication for the novel, its implication for the characters, LM Montgomery and her women-writing-men skills, the historical context, the foreshadowing, the incredible little details (Valancy describes Barney as looking like "an amused gnome," and I CANNOT) - but I shall have to limit myself.

Of all the details in this scene, one of the ones I love the most is that we learn that Barney is the only person so far who treated Valancy with respect. In contrast to the clerks sneering about her spinsterhood in the previous chapter, we get:

He had been crawling out from under his car then, too, and he had given her a cheerful grin as she went by—a little, whimsical grin that gave him the look of an amused gnome. 

It's interesting to me that after chapters of Valancy retreading painful and embarrassing memories of being discarded and unwanted, we come to her first nice memory - and it's of Barney. Nothing about this is romantic; Barney simply treated her as a person worth acknowledging! Although Valancy somewhat brushes over the memory itself, we can see its impact on her:

He didn’t look bad—she didn’t believe he was bad, in spite of the wild yarns that were always being told of him. Of course he went tearing in that terrible old Grey Slosson through Deerwood at hours when all decent people were in bed—often with old “Roaring Abel,” who made the night hideous with his howls—“both of them dead drunk, my dear.” And every one knew that he was an escaped convict and a defaulting bank clerk and a murderer in hiding and an infidel and an illegitimate son of old Roaring Abel Gay and the father of Roaring Abel’s illegitimate grandchild and a counterfeiter and a forger and a few other awful things. But still Valancy didn’t believe he was bad. Nobody with a smile like that could be bad, no matter what he had done.

Valancy! Of course, gossip is often wrong and she knows it, just look at how she pokes fun of it - but just become someone has a nice smile does not a nice person make. I know that this is an LM Montgomery novel, and LM Montgomery often has heroines read someone at a glance like this - but disregarding that context, this demonstrates just how starved Valancy is for affection. A strange man smiles at her, and she essentially falls in love with him lmao (i will say Valancy getting a crush so quickly is very relatable and entertaining, very 'he opened the door for me, he's in love' vibes):

It was that night the Prince of the Blue Castle changed from a being of grim jaw and hair with a dash of premature grey to a rakish individual with overlong, tawny hair, dashed with red, dark-brown eyes, and ears that stuck out just enough to give him an alert look but not enough to be called flying jibs. But he still retained something a little grim about the jaw.

(Also, LM Montgomery's comments on ears are back. hmmm.)

I love the word choices used to describe Barney: raffish, rakish, unshaved, muddy, gleeful, villainous, whimsical, amused GNOME (never forget), outlaw, alert - it paints such an interesting picture of this scruffy backwoodsman who is filthy (and probably smelly, although that is decidedly less romantic) yet intriguing. It's the classic LM Montgomery love interest of someone who isn't yawningly perfect but richly complex.

I read, although I doubt this is true (what can I say, I'm skeptical) that Barney is the only male love interest LM Montgomery ever describes physically at length. To be fair, a lot of it is how dirty he is (lmao), but I think it points to Valancy's attraction and as previously discussed, her sexual desire (especially given how Barney features as a lover in her Blue Castle! Now I'm trying to remember if Barney ever learns this fact haha) Like, Valancy notices his bare arms (😱) - her attraction is explicitly stated, and underneath the attraction is this undercurrent of sexuality.

Lastly, I love the little detail of how Barney is waiting at the end of Lover's Lane - Valancy walks down it alone, to find Barney at the end. :')))

#blue castle spoilers #I'm tagging that because I don't know if barney being the love interest is a spoiler?? #I feel like it's blatantly obvious but just in case #the blue castle book club #barney snaith

[autumnrose11]

I wrote my first The Blue Castle fanfic! One-shot. It isn't much, but I hope you enjoy :)

***

If there was one thing Valancy loved on earth, it was long walks alone with Barney. 

She adored trotting beside him, his hand in hers as he pointed out a fern here, or a daisy there; the sound of his voice, his laughter that tinkled like golden bells, the way his eyes sparkled when the light caught them. 

One such evening found them strolling together round the edge of Mistawis Lake. Valancy had a basket of berries on her arm, and it swung merrily as they stepped over stray pebbles and weeds and grasses. The sky was stained with a rosy light tinged with saffron and amber, and in the quiet of the twilight the waves shone with an aquamarine radiance. Barney’s arm was around her shoulders, and hers round his waist, and as the thrushes chirped in the bushes and the frogs gurgled and a sweet wind cooled her cheeks, Valancy felt there never had been a pleasanter evening in all her life. 

“Do you know, Moonlight,” Barney murmured, guiding her deftly over a rock, “you can catch tadpoles just round this time of year, if the water’s quite warm?”

Valancy looked back at him in surprise. 

“Can you?” 

“Should be easy enough,” Barney said. “We can’t take any back with us — we haven’t any jars or nets or anything — but it would be fun to simply try.” 

“John Foster says,” began Valancy. But Barney had swung round already with an exasperated sigh and was walking quickly towards the rim of the lake. Blue-green woven with ephemeral light, the waves lapping tenderly at their grassy edges. The sound was calmer and more soothing and gentle than any Valancy had ever known — bar the ones of Barney’s kisses and his soft breathing while he lay in her arms. 

“Barney, wait!” Valancy hurried after him, and watched him take off his socks and shoes and dip his long fingers in the water, moving his hand through it, the ripples resounding. 

Barney turned and beckoned to her. She gingerly slipped over and set down the basket of berries, and he helped her over to his side, crouching over the edge of the lake. 

“There,” he said, pointing. “Do you see?” 

And Valancy did see. Tiny black wriggling creatures, writhing beneath the waves, whole clusters of them moving together, twisting and turning in the limpid water. Barney thrust his hand in and scooped up a triad of excited little fellows, jumping about in his palm. He laughed and let them go. 

“Now you try, Moonlight,” he said. 

Valancy put out her hand. The water felt deliciously warm against her pale skin. She felt the tadpoles against her flesh — wet and slimy and unlike anything she’d ever touched before but somehow so new, and not at all unpleasant. 

With a surprised “Oh!” she lost her hold of them, and the little things escaped. Barney chuckled quietly. 

“Try again. Cup your hand, like this,” he said, showing her. 

She did. And lost them again, with a great deal of giggling from them both. Barney kissed her cheek softly, his eyes glistening with something like affection. 

“I’m going to get them this time,” Valancy said resolutely, amidst her continued laughter, “I really am.” 

And so unwavering was her conviction that she leaned in to scoop up the tadpoles in her palm as Barney had done so quickly and easily — only too far in, for all at once she lost her balance, and would have fallen clean in if Barney hadn’t caught hold of her arm with a — “Valancy — honey!” 

He pulled her back quickly.  She only had a tiny graze on her palm from trying to steady herself, and it had brushed a jagged rock rather roughly.  

“Are you alright?” he asked, quite visibly worried. 

Valency nodded. 

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have —” She could see him reproaching himself. Barney took her palm that had been injured, and very gently lifted it to his lips. His hand touched her face; stroking, caressing. 

And then his lips were upon hers, soft and hot and wonderful. They kissed in the falling dusk while the first stars blossomed and the silver birches rustled and crimson slowly faded to purple and the air grew imperceptibly more chill. 

And the tadpoles wriggled away, forgotten. 

#the blue castle book club #the blue castle #the blue castle fanfiction #the blue castle fanfic #valancy stirling #barney snaith #valarney #lm montgomery #fanfic #fic

[purple-crayoner]

Thanks to all the wonderful color analysis the first thing that caught my eye was that Dr. Redfern is wearing green (and has a green hat, like Vacancy's). While the green is perhaps a loud and garish shade (and the wearer seriously lacking in tact) he is straightaway friendly to Valancy. Idk, I like the little connection

#now i want a silly story where valancy and her father-in-law go hat shopping #the blue castle #blue castle book club #the blue castle book club