de la Roche, Mazo

Person

de la Roche, Mazo

1879-1961

Mazo Roche (she later added the 'de la' to her name) was born in 1879 in Newmarket, Ontario. She was the only child of William Roche, a salesman, and Alberta (Lundy) Roche. In her childhood her parents adopted her orphaned cousin, Caroline Clement, who became her lifelong companion. As a child the Roche family lived in a cottage on a gentleman farmer's estate and it was there that de la Roche began to develop her world of rural aristocracy which played such a large part in her wiritings.

Mazo’s education combined formal schooling with extensive reading at home and music and art classes. De la Roche went on to study Art and English at the University of Toronto. In 1915, de la Roche published her first magazine story, in the Atlantic Monthly, and continued to write as much as she could after that. In 1927 her story "Jalna" won the Atlantic Monthly’s prize of $10,000. This prestigious prize gave her the financial freedom to pursue writing full-time and to move to Europe.

Her novel, Jalna (1927), was followed by a series depicting the history, backwards and forwards in time, of the Whiteoaks family who lived at "Jalna". The series includes 16 novels; among them are Whiteoaks (1929), Finch's Fortune (1931), Young Renny (1935), Whiteoak Harvest (1936), Growth of a Man (1938), The Building of Jalna (1944), and Mary Wakefield (1949). Her novels were translated into dozens of languages, and adapted for stage, screen and television. De la Roche also wrote plays, children's books, a history of Quebec, and an autobiography, "Ringing the Changes" (1957). She was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal by the Royal Society of Canada in 1938.

Mazo lived in Europe (mainly in England) until 1939. With the advent of the Second World War, she and Caroline returned to North America with her two adopted children, a brother and sister. She spent the rest of her life mostly in Toronto, where she died at age 82. She was buried at St. George’s Church, at Sutton, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Simcoe.

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