Hi List, I have, since a young girl, collected the works of Canadian author, L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. It was only very late in my collecting that I came across one of her rarest books, one of the only two adult stories that she wrote, called The Blue Castle. In this her heroine, Valency, is a spinster living with her widowed mother on the charity of her father's two sisters, in a rather snobbish family. Her mother is always put down, as marrying from, in their opinion "beneath" her husband, and was, in fact, a Barraclough. Whenever Valency does anything strange (in this case an apparently very unusual marriage) it is "the Barraclough coming out in her". Her grandfather, old Amos Barraclough, although he never makes an appearance, is used to show genuine kindness without pretension, and a bit of happy unpredictability. Now, I have just trawled through "The Wheel of Things", the biography of L.M. Montgomery, because when I have read it before I have come across one paragraph about a Barraclough family with which L.M.M. was friendly. But do you think I can find it? No! So I am off to put the book on my bedside table to read it line by line. Can anyone save me from that fate, and name which Canadian family it was? Cheers, Linda Barraclough Briagolong, Victoria, Australia Listowner: BARRACLOUGH-L e-mail: [email protected] and fan of L.M. Montgomery