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.