Hello kindred spirits! I’m back with another episode of the MaudCast, the podcast of the Lucy Maud Montgomery Institute. In S03E01, we are talking about The Blue Castle manuscript.
This conversation with Carolyn Strom Collins is inspired by a book that has it all–humour, scandal, romance, near-death experiences, snake-oil salesmen, backwoods religion, missing millionaires, philosophical cats, Muskoka sunsets, and even Anglicans. If you haven’t encountered Montgomery’s novel, The Blue Castle, I hope my irresponsible little book jacket description invites you to add it to your reading list.
The Blue Castle is unique in Montgomery’s library. With its location on the edge of the Muskoka wilderness in the Canadian Shield, it is the only full-length novel with no connection to Prince Edward Island. All of Montgomery’s books are funny, but there is a wayward, free-for-all abandon in The Blue Castle that gives life to what I think is her most hilarious story. As a romance, it is also a decidedly adult novel that goes beyond tried-and-true love stories and her fairy-tinged tales of youth. As I discuss with the folks from the Bonnets at Dawn podcast, this is a “Bluebeard” tale with its own threads of danger and beauty.
It is a novel I love to talk about. So, when Carolyn Strom Collins launched The Blue Castle: The Original Manuscript, I knew that I wanted to invite her back on the MaudCast. Beyond the chance to read a great book in a new way, it was a perfect opportunity to talk about one of my favourite topics: archives.
As a fellow haunter of ancient stacks, I was thrilled by Carolyn’s earlier publication, Anne of Green Gables: The Original Manuscript. Carolyn provides a typescript of the famous Anne manuscript, including the several layers of Montgomery’s editorial notes as the novel progressed toward publication.
Since that time, a brilliant team led by Emily Woster has published the Anne Manuscript project, including high-quality scans, transcriptions, scholarly notes, and a new French translation. ‘Tis a digital age archival delight (and hopefully a future MaudCast spotlight).
Now, Carolyn has returned to the MaudCast studio to talk about the second volume of her manuscript series, The Blue Castle: The Original Manuscript. I recently finished rereading The Blue Castle with my book club. I used the opportunity to pull the pencil from behind my ear and mark up the new manuscript edition.
In this new edition, Carolyn Strom Collins transcribes L.M. Montgomery’s handwritten text of The Blue Castle, including the edits and notes L.M. Montgomery made while working through the drafts leading to the typescript (which is lost). Here is the Nimbus Publishing Book Description:
Available for the first time ever, the original draft of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s The Blue Castle is presented with scribbled notes, character name changes, additions and deletions, and other pre-publication changes, offering fascinating new insight into the writing process of one of Canada’s most beloved writers.
With thanks to “Shop at Sullivan” for providing a series of clearer photos than my scratched-up copy could produce, you can get a sense of how the book works.
On the first page of each chapter, there is a photo of the handwritten manuscript of The Blue Castle, which includes Montgomery’s revisions, scribbled notes, character name changes, large and small additions and deletions, and the other markings that are part of the creative process. Carolyn provides a transcript that captures the main text and uses a series of symbols and footnotes to retain the fidelity of the archived manuscript.
The result is that we get to see some of the layers of Montgomery’s tools of invention, all the while watching her make select artistic choices. For example, the heroine “Valency” had a quite different name in earlier editions–a name that I simply cannot imagine was a good choice. And there are cats, streets, and village parsons to name, as well as a few historic locations to fictionalize.
Plus, as a reader, I can add my own notations, giving another layer to the life of the book.
As a writer and reader, it’s the kind of book that I quite love, so this new edition is welcome.
And now I can share it with you, including a lovely conversation with the editor who spent all those months paying attention to every tiny detail so that we could see the whole thing in new ways.
Farewell!
Brenton Dickieson, MaudCast Host
You can find the MaudCast on Podbean, Spotify, and leading podcast platforms. You can click below for the Spotify and Podbean links.
Guest Bio: Carolyn Strom Collins is the author of The Anne of Green Gables Treasury and other “Anne” companion books. She has also published companion books on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Carolyn founded The L. M. Montgomery Literary Society as well as the Friends of the L. M. Montgomery Institute. In season one of the MaudCast, Carolyn has previously joined us to discuss a couple of her editorial projects: After Many Years: Twenty-one “Long-Lost” Stories by L. M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables: The Original Manuscript. We are sitting down with Carolyn on the release of another brilliant Montgomery archival resource, The Blue Castle: The Original Manuscript.
Wow – doubly fascinating, at least! I don’t remember ever hearing of this novel before – and how inherently interesting manuscript studies are. But “this is a ‘Bluebeard’ tale” sounds quite alarming. (Whereupon I will briefly indulge in my tale of the unpublished Bluebeard musical written by William Hillsley and staged in a Nazi all-male-civilian internship camp (where P.G. Wodehouse also was for a while): it apparently has the form of a comic mystery with characters including Lord Peter Wimsey, Mervin Bunter,and Miss Dorothy L. Sayers!)
Amazing, David. Unpublished but also, I am guessing, never staged?
Only in the camp, as far as I know – I’ve seen photos of the amateur actors in costume, though I’d have to go digging to see if one of the chaps I remember is dressed as DLS or another impressive lady in a different production. They took at least one production ‘on tour’ to a nearby POW camp, where Denholm Elliott was one of the prisoners. Hilsley (to whom I sloppily ascribed on a extra ‘L’ in my previous comment) also wrote a Mass setting for some priests in the camp. Somebody from Swedish Radio was able to visit camps and make recordings which were later broadcast – during the war – on a program called ‘From Behind Barbed Wire’ – including things with, and I think by, Hilsley. I’ve found recent recordings of one thing and another of his ‘Ilag VIII’ works on YouTube from time to time.
Woops! Looking for you remail I saw this unread comment. Only 2 months ago … not bad!
It’s not very often POW camps get the cuttin-edge art, is it?
Here I go on another tangent – having just read Cherry Kearton’s book, My Friend Toto (1926) I became (thanks to Wikipedia) aware of the Kearton brothers – and immediately wonder what possible Inklings awareness of them (e.g., Cherry Kearton’s jungle descriptions remind me of Mirkwood, and his friendships with animals of Ransome – and Lewis) – I now looked up the author of its introduction, Sir George Parker – and thanks to Wikipedia encountered a prominent Canadian author (hitherto unknown to me)!
Have you read him? Is there all sorts of interesting Parker-Mongomery interaction of which I am equally unaware?
Wikipedia quotes an editor of a new edition of his collection, The Lane that Had No Turning, and Other Tales Concerning the People of Pontiac (1900) that “Parker’s tales are times downright weird, with dark intrigue, generous hearts, tortured souls, and desperate violence” – and (paraphrases Wikipedia?) “is viewed by some as being in the tradition of such Gothic classics as Stoker’s Dracula and James’s The Turn of the Screw.” That sounds intriguing – and like it might fit in with The Blue Castle (as well as some Inklings tastes).
Awesome, but all mostly new to me. Ben Lefebvre in Ontario has done a huge amount of research and publication of Montgomery materials, and especially reception pieces that would be lost to history. Gilbert Parker shows up in pieces that he has published that are primarily reviews of Montgomery’s work–several times in fact. Here’s a quote from a marvelously named Owen McGillicuddy in a 1920 piece called “A Sextette of Canadian Women Writers” (rather an unfortunate title, methinks), which includes LMM:
“Canadians are beginning to take a greater interest in their native literature than they ever did in the past. Of course, it is quite true that such writers as Stephen Leacock, Norman Duncan, Sir Gilbert Parker, and Ralph Connor, have always found a large public in the Dominion. Nevertheless, in the last few years, there have been a number of women who have been winning increasing popularity. At the present time there are at least six women whose books are eagerly awaited by the Canadian public. The writers I refer to are Mrs. Emily Murphy, known to the reading world as “Janey Canuck,” Mrs. Grace McLeod Rogers, Mrs. Nellie McClung, Mrs. Evah McKowan, Mrs. Ewan Macdonald, who signs herself “L.M. Montgomery,” and Mrs. Isabel Ecclestone Mackay. All of these women are married, the majority of them having children, as well as their literary work, to occupy their attention.”
Of these writers, I only know S. Leacock and Nellie McClung.
It seems to be a theme, this from a 1925 review of Rilla of Ingleside:
“I am surprised that more is not made of [L.M. Montgomery’s] fine gift in the numerous speeches and articles on Canadian books that bloom forth profusely each year around Book Week. When the critic talks about Canadian poetry, he is fluent; when the subject veers around to the Canadian novel, a strange silence falls; he mentions Gilbert Parker, and apologizes for half a dozen others, and passes on with a sigh of relief to Canada’s nature writing. The fact is that we have outstanding poetry and natural history, and only second-rate fiction. But something more might be made of L.M. Montgomery. Fiction for girls is perhaps not as dignified a subject for grey bearded critics as fiction for adults, but at least it might be said that L.M. Montgomery towers over Meade and Southworth and Holmes and Porter, yes, and even Kate Douglas Wiggin and Gene Stratton-Porter, of our Southern neighbors, and, in short, would receive a great many notes as the finest writer of girls books alive on the continent today. And it’s something to boast of a Canadian the finest novelist even if the field is only girl’s fiction. Our adult fiction is about third or fourth rate, mostly; let us rejoice that we can number in our ranks the author of Anne of
Green Gables.”
Man, the “girls book” condescension!