Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by George Inness, Piet Mondrian and Jules Bastien-Lepage. Valancy Stirling is twenty-nine, unmarried and bullied by a clan of relatives, and a doctor's letter tells her she has a year to live — so she says what she thinks, moves out, and proposes to the most disreputable man in the county. Montgomery wrote one of her only two novels for adults in 1926 and set it in Ontario rather than the island. The diagnosis is not the twist; what Valancy does with it is. Fifty-nine plates by painters including Hammershøi and Grimshaw follow Valancy from closed parlors to open water, tracing the quiet interiors and lit streets of her escape.
