The Jalna Saga – Deluxe Edition: All Sixteen Books of the Enduring Classic Series & The Biography of Mazo de la Roche (665 page)

Hugh Eayrs, the president of the Canadian branch of the Macmillan publishing company, invited Mazo to come and have tea with him in his office. Mazo was excited because she admired the influential Englishman and because this would be her first visit to a publisher’s office.

It was winter. Before she left her house Mazo had to check the coal furnace in the basement to make sure it was working properly. Before going down to the basement, Mazo put on a shabby old grey sweater with a hole in one elbow to protect the pretty dress she was wearing for the big occasion. When she came back upstairs, she forgot to take the sweater off. She put her muskrat coat on top of the sweater and set out.

Hugh Eayrs welcomed Mazo to his office. A typist brought in the tea things and left. Just as Mr. Eayrs was about to help Mazo off with her coat, he was called out of the office and hurried away. Left alone, Mazo decided to remove her coat herself. She was shocked to discover she was still wearing the ugly old sweater.

What to do? Put the coat back on and insist she could not take it off because she was cold? But the office was hot!

Mazo was in a panic. But then she noticed a window was open to the street. Quickly she removed her grey sweater, rolled it up, and threw it out the window.

“What a pretty dress!” Mr. Eayrs exclaimed when he returned to the office.

As she and the publisher had their tea and got acquainted, Mazo could not stop thinking about her sweater lying in the street. She was afraid someone would walk into the office any moment to return it to her.

But Mazo never saw her old grey sweater again.

She did, however, see Hugh Eayrs, who became her publisher. This was the beginning of a very long association between Mazo and Macmillan, which published her next book – a novel.

Caroline Clement in her forties possibly behind St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Innisfil Township at the edge of land she inherited from her Grandfather Clement.

Possession, Thunder,
and
Delight

Looking back over my life, it is borne in on me how much I have walked. Walk – walk – walk – usually with a dog beside me – over city pavements – along country roads
.

M
azo was writing a novel. It was her first novel, and it was called
Possession
. The novel started like this: “On an evening in early May, a young man was walking sharply along the country road that passed through the fishing-village of Mistwell, and following the shore of one of those inland seas, oddly called great lakes, led to the town of Brancepeth, seven miles away.”

The main character in
Possession
is a young architect named Derek Vale. Vale inherits a farm called “Grimstone” near Mistwell and goes to live there. Through his weaknesses and mistakes, Vale almost loses his farm and does lose his true love.

Although engaged to Grace Jerrold, the daughter of an upper-class English neighbour, Derek Vale seduces Fawnie, a beautiful young First Nations employee. Vale’s union with Fawnie results in a son named Buckskin. Vale marries Fawnie and provides a home for their son, but Fawnie leaves Vale for a First Nations man, and Buckskin dies because of neglect. Although Fawnie eventually returns to him, and Vale remains faithful to Fawnie, Vale is not happy because he loves Grace, not Fawnie.

In writing
Possession
, Mazo was writing fiction, but she was creating this fiction out of elements from her past experiences. Countless details of
Possession
correspond to details of Mazo’s real life. For example, the novel’s setting, Grimstone in Mistwell, is a relatively exact rendering of the real Roche farm in Bronte.

Published in 1923 by the Macmillan Company,
Possession
was widely praised in Canada and abroad. Reviewers over and over again made it clear that they were hailing a novel that said something about Canada.

One reviewer wrote: “
Possession
is the best Canadian novel I have ever read.”

Another reviewer wrote: “There is no other novel about Canadians that has given us as much pleasure as
Possession
.”

Mazo soon learned that the success of one novel did not guarantee the success of another. After she finished writing
Possession
, she travelled to Nova Scotia for a month-long stay. From observations she made of life in that province, she wrote her second novel,
The Thunder of New Wings
.

Echoing her descriptions of Derek Vale, Mazo described the main character, Toby Lashbrook, as “selfwilled,” often “wrong headed,” but “keen,” and with the “power of seeing his life as a whole.” Like Vale, Lashbrook learns farming. Like Vale, Lashbrook is weak and irresponsible. He has a son by his stepmother, Clara, and his relationship with Clara is not good. He fails to keep his family together, and loses most of his material wealth.

Unfortunately, the novel was unsatisfactory. This time, Mazo did not anchor her fiction with carefully observed, deeply felt material from her real-life experiences. Her knowledge of Nova Scotia was too superficial to sustain a fictional work of several hundred pages.

No publisher wanted
The Thunder of New Wings
. Although Mazo had spent a year working on it, she flung the manuscript into a drawer and tried to forget it by taking long walks with Bunty.

While Mazo was in Nova Scotia, Caroline, who was still working full time in the provincial government, spent a weekend in a guest house in Clarkson, a little village that is now part of the sprawling city of Mississauga, twenty-five kilometres west of Toronto, on Lake Ontario. In Clarkson, Caroline met Florence Livesay, a translator and journalist, the wife of J.F.B. Livesay, the head of Canadian Press.

After the two women drank tea together, they took a walk in the woods near the Livesays’ house, and Caroline was delighted by the scenery. Immediately Caroline decided that she and Mazo should buy one of the vacant properties adjacent to the Livesays’ home and build a small cottage on it.

Mazo and Caroline called their new summer home “Trail Cottage” because it was located on what had once been a First Nations trail to the Credit River. The woods around the cottage were full of Miliums, blood root, columbines, rare fringed gentian, trailing arbutus, and wintergreen. The rafters of the cottage were unadorned – there was no ceiling – and the walls were of unpainted pine. Trail Cottage consisted of a large living room with an alcove for the kitchen, where Mazo did the cooking.

After a long cold winter in Toronto in rented quarters, Mazo and Caroline were happily spending the summer of 1924 in Trail Cottage. Mazo, undaunted by failure, was working on her third novel,
Delight
. This novel would be different from
The Thunder of New Wings
. This novel would not fail. This novel would be set in Mazo’s home province.

After she finished her writing for the day, Mazo always took a long walk with Bunty through the woods. Then she tidied up the cottage and began to get supper ready. After she and Caroline had eaten in the evening, Mazo read Caroline what she had written that day. If Caroline approved, the words stayed as they were.

The setting of
Delight
was Brancepeth. Brancepeth had characteristics of Acton, Ontario, but it was set beside an “inland sea.” Since Acton is located thirtyfive kilometres north of Lake Ontario, Mazo evidently borrowed the location of Brancepeth from a town on Lake Ontario, like Oakville or Clarkson or Burlington.

When Mazo wrote
Delight
she had not been in Acton for thirteen years, so she mixed details from her present, visible surroundings with details from her remembered, invisible surroundings. Then she spiced the mixture with invented elements that helped make the story more interesting and universal. Her creative process was complex.

In
Delight
, Mazo wrote about a young woman who has inherited only her grandmother’s dishes and must work for a living. Delight Mainprize is the illegitimate daughter of an English chorus girl and a Russian ballet dancer. She has been raised by a lower-class grandmother in rural England. Delight has immigrated to Canada to take a job as a waitress at the Duke of York Hotel in Brancepeth.

Delight Mainprize is a potent combination of beautiful Venus and chaste Diana. She is unconscious of her seductive charms and bewildered by the effect she has on people: men love her and scheme to have her, and women hate her and scheme to destroy her. Delight is a good worker at the Duke of York and a virtuous girlfriend to Jimmy Sykes, but through no fault of her own the other women at work become jealous of her, and Jimmy doubts her virtue.

The women force Delight to leave town. She finds work on a farm where, again through no fault of her own, she is half starved and nearly raped. When she returns to town and begins waitressing at another hotel, the other women try to drown her in the lagoon, and the men try to rescue her.