Mazo De La Roche Biography

Canadian novelist, born in Newmarket, Ontario, brought up on a fruit and stock farm in Ontario, a background which was to appear in her fiction; she was educated at Toronto University and Toronto School of Art. Her novel Jalna (1927), the first novel in the ‘Whiteoak Chronicles’, distinguished her as the first Canadian to become an international bestseller. By 1949, it was estimated that 2,000,000 copies of her novels, translated into fifteen languages, had been sold. A subsequent twenty novels in the Whiteoak Chronicles narrated the deeds of the Whiteoak family, from the matriarch Ardeline to the handsome virile Renny.