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Mazo De La Rocha
Mistress of Jalna 1879-1961

Mazo de la Roche is something of an enigma to anyone wanting biographical information. What she did tell people was subtly altered from the truth: she changed her date and place of birth, changed her name, and rewrote the family’s history. Her first biographers faced something of a challenge to establish the true facts of her life. But her fiction writing was different altogether. The sixteen Jalna books have a large number of colourful characters and cover a century of Canadian history. Written over more than thirty years and not in chronological order, they contain a family tree, refreshed each volume, showing that she adhered to a strict time frame. She herself said, “I have put myself into my books.” Perhaps that is ultimately where one can find her. One wonders which of her wonderful characters she could have been - my guess would be Mary Whiteoak.

The de la Roche family moved frequently because of her father's rich variety of jobs and her mother's ailing health. It was this vast experience of colonial life in Canada that gave Mazo the inspiration on which she later drew for the Whiteoaks saga, developing a complex world of fantasy which she called "The Play". In it she dreamed up imaginary characters and scenarios, often involving her lifelong companion, her cousin Caroline Clement.]

Mazo de la Roche received a formal education which included extensive music and art classes, and in 1902 she was able to publish her first short story. She wrote as much as she could thereafter, and in 1927 won the prestigious Atlantic Monthly Magazine prize of $10,000. This gave her the financial freedom she needed to write full time, and to travel in Europe. She settled in England until the outbreak of World War Two, when she returned to Canada with the two children she and Caroline had adopted. She lived the rest of her life in Toronto, until she died, aged 82.

Though she wrote other things, of course, she is best remembered for the Whiteoak saga, the Jalna series, which chronicles the lives of the Whiteoak family. Jalna, their family house, was named for the station in Indiawhere the first Whiteoak, Philip, served before settling with his wife in a community of retired British officers on the shores of Canada’s Lake Ontario. The novels are full of fascinating but not always likeable people, passionate people playing out Mazo's "play" against a  backdrop of intense loyalty to family and an abiding love of the family home. The books also depict Canadian nature as well as people and reveal Mazo’s love of animals, particularly horses and dogs, but also the changes of the seasons, and the beauty of the Ontario scenery. Her descriptions of Britain and Ireland similarly show her strong relationship to her surroundings and her own family bakground and heritage.

By the time of Mazo’s death in 1961, her Jalna series had sold 12 million copies. The novels have been adapted for theatre, radio, television, and there was even a 1935 RKO movie called Jalna, directed by John Cromwell. Allied secret agents used a Jalna book as the basis for a code during World War II. A 1960 poll found Mazo, along with A. J. Cronin, the favourite of French school children. As a frequent guest of the Royal Family until she returned to Canada in 1939, Mazo de la Roche was one of the most enigmatic and successful novelists to emerge out of Canada, and is still held in the highest esteem. She is also a role-model for the many "saga" writers writing today, and one can see the literary heritage clearly. It is tempting to dismiss Mazo de la Roche as a romantc novelist, but there is romance in most people's lives, and her characterisation was sublime, with people like Renny Whiteoak and his half-brothers, Finch, Eden and Wakefield, and the plots, though often predictable, are still a joy to read.

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