Before You Begin

Before you begin.

For twenty-nine grey years Valancy Stirling has done exactly as she was told — obeying a cold, domineering mother, enduring a carping clan, and dreaming in secret of a Blue Castle in Spain where she is mistress of her own life. Then a doctor's quiet letter changes everything: her heart, she is told, may fail at any moment. And Valancy, with nothing left to lose, decides at last to truly live.

What follows is the warmest, wittiest, and most quietly daring of L. M. Montgomery's novels. Valancy speaks her mind to the horrified clan, walks out to keep house for the disreputable Roaring Abel and nurse his dying daughter, and — to the scandal of all Deerwood — proposes marriage to Barney Snaith, the mysterious man of the island. In the pine-and-lake wilderness of Muskoka she finds her real Blue Castle, and a happiness, and a truth, she never imagined.

Published in 1926 by the beloved creator of Anne of Green Gables, The Blue Castle was Montgomery's one novel written for grown-ups, set in the Ontario lake country she adored. A century on, its blend of sharp comedy and open-hearted romance still enchants.

This illustrated edition opens the story into a gallery of plates — the cast and their portraits, the map of Valancy's Muskoka and its shining places, the great scenes, and six movement plates you unlock as you read, each drawing the story so far together without revealing what waits ahead. Turn the page, and step out of the grey house into the sun.