PRIZE-WINNING had come to be quite a habit with Mazo de la Roche even before her recent success in carrying off the $10,000 prize for the best novel submitted in the contest conducted by the Atlantic Monthly of Boston. The previous awards, however, had been for one-act plays. There are various estimates, all the way up to $50,000, as to the total amount accruing from Jalna, and it is particularly pleasurable to be able to chronicle the indubitable fact that in this ease the winner was a native-born Canadian, Toronto being her birth-place. I do not know whether this event has much significance for others, but I have, in recent years, run into a lot of pooh-poohing of Canadian letters. If a writer, who had come to Canada a babe in arms, grows up in thoroughly Canadian surroundings and in due course achieves literary success, this author is “after all not really a Canadian.” A prizewinning novel clearly inspired by experiences of living in Western Canada cannot possibly be classed as Canadian—the author is Norwegian, although she came to Canada at the age of three—and so ad nauseam.

It was with Explorers of the Dawn that Miss De La Roche first came into prominence and the fact that it had a foreword by Christopher Morley was in itself a distinction. Her work had already been appearing in such magazines as Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, and this book was marked by the piquancy, fantastic coloring and clever characterization which have accounted to so great an extent for her later successes.

The novels Possession and Delight gave promise of that greater achievement now realized in Jalna, which will be taken to heart by Canadians not only for its innate merits, but because of its justification of Canada’s claim to a less cramped place in the literary sun.

No estimate of this author’s work should fail to emphasize her outstanding success with one-act plays. She has several of these to her credit which are of a very high order, the best of them being Low Life, which is a contribution of no mean significance to Canadian literature. Ever since its first appearance it has taken a large place in the activities of community theatres in different parts of Canada. T repeat that this is an achievement of more than passing interest. It is a forward step in a distinct branch of the development of Canadian literature.

Retrospectively, the work of Mazo De La Roche is an interesting subject for students of Canadian literature, but it is the significance of the growth and accomplishment revealed in what she has done that convinces one that her star is in the ascendant and that there are still finer things to come from this source.

Miss De La Roche is of French, Irish and English ancestry. The De La Roches were a French Royalist family who fled to Ireland at the time of the French Revolution.

Born in Toronto, she attended public school and Parkdale Collegiate and subsequently the University of Toronto. Later, with an ambition to become a black-and-white illustrator, she took a course in the College of Art, but the acceptance by Munsey’s Magazine a story about French Canada, turned her attention to literature as a career, with the result so eloquently attested by her experience with Jalna.

Miss De La Roche is a great lover of outdoor life, and her snug little summer cottage near Clarkson, on the shore of Lake Ontario, is said to be in the very locale of more than one of her novels.

Check-List of First Editions

Explorers of the Dawn. New York, 1922.
Possession. Toronto. 1923.
Delight. New York. 1926.
Low Life: A Play. Toronto. 1925.
Jalna. New York. 1927.
Come True: A Play. Toronto. 1927.