lifelong companion. After the couple moved to Toronto, Caroline took a government job to provide them with some financial stability and also accepted additional duties as Mazo’s accountant, typist, manager, and editor. That same year, all hell broke loose as the literary world beat a path to the door of that second-floor flat in Yorkville when Atlantic Monthly announced that they had awarded Mazo de la Roche their annual prize for novel of the year. The prize was $10,000 — in 1927 dollars.—when such a sum would have been enough to buy three detached, brick houses in central Toronto. The novel was Jalna.
Mazo was now forty-eight years old. Hers had not been an overnight success, but suddenly she was an international phenomenon. Reporters from all over North America journeyed to Toronto in hopes of being granted an interview. The City of Toronto honoured her with a banquet. All in all, it was too much for such a reclusive person. Shortly after the initial hoopla died down, Caroline quit her job and the two women left for an extended European vacation — so extended in fact that they did not return to Canada for several years.
After travelling through continental Europe, the couple settled near London, in the vicinity of Windsor Castle, in a Tudor mansion called Vale House. Once they were settled in, Mazo set to work adapting her novel for the London stage. Renamed “Whiteoaks,” the production ran for a record-breaking three years before touring Canada and the United States with Ethel Barrymore in one of the starring roles. In 1931, the novel was turned into a feature film that still pops up on evening television.
While in England, Mazo and Caroline decided that they would like to adopt two children, but their request was met with formidable resistance because, in the parlance of the times, two spinsters just didn’t go about adopting children. It was only through the intervention of Mazo’s publisher (and future British prime minister) Harold Macmillan that the women were able to realize their dreams by adopting a daughter named Esmée and a son, René. The two women adored the English country lifestyle, but the war clouds that loomed in 1939 forced them to head for home.
Upon their return to Canada, they set out to duplicate the country life they had enjoyed so much in England. They chose North York as the place to do so when they purchased Mrs. Land’s summer house at Bayview and Steeles. The house as constructed in 1933 was a little too square and stodgy for the couple’s taste, so they added new wings to the east and west sides of the house, embellished with impressive Tudor details. The west wing housed garages and servants’ quarters while the east wing was dominated by a spectacular English-style library with an eighteen-foot ceiling and a soaring, floor-to-ceiling bay window. The library’s interior was panelled in hand-carved dark oak and featured two fireplaces with carved mantelpieces, one on the east wall and one on the north wall, where Mazo did much of her writing. A hidden door next to this fireplace led to the master bedroom on the second floor. A balcony off the master bedroom looked down into the library below. Mazo named the new estate “Windrush Hill.”
Surely one of the most beautiful homes ever constructed in the current city of Toronto and still standing on its original height of land at Bayview and Steeles, “Windrush Hill” is pictured here in this 1961 photo by Lorna Gardner.
Courtesy of North York Historical Society, NYHS 1417.
Life at Windrush Hill was all that Caroline and Mazo had hoped it would be. The children swam in the East Don in summertime and skated on it in the winter. The family added some dogs to the mix and the forested grounds became the scene of many childhood adventures. They welcomed other artists into their home including Angus Macdonald, who lived in the former Benjamin Fish gristmill on the northeast corner of Bayview and Steeles, where the gas station stands today, and whose stained glass would grace such edifices as the original Sunnybrook Hospital. The family maintained the country lifestyle by doing their shopping in Thornhill rather than Toronto. In the summer they enjoyed riding their bikes on the generally empty two-lane dirt roads that were Bayview and Steeles back then. Mazo continued her prolific series of Jalna novels, but country life was not without its drawbacks.
The isolation meant that winters could be cold and lonely, never more so than when the family was snowed in. During those times, there was often no way to reach the outside world other than to strap on snowshoes and walk to Yonge Street to catch a radial car. Remember that there were few snowploughs and no buses serving the area around Bayview and Steeles until the 1950s. In addition, the huge house was extremely difficult to heat, and the outdoor oil tank and over-worked furnace failed numerous times. Mazo de la Roche was also beginning to be plagued by the health problems that would follow her for the rest of life, most notably a chronic kidney infection and arthritis. There were also problems getting domestic staff to agree to such isolation, and, when the children grew to school age, their transportation provided some unique problems as well. Esmée attended Havergal College at Lawrence and Avenue Road while René was enrolled at Upper Canada College, even further south. Most of the family’s war-time gas ration was used up transporting the children to and from school. Gas rationing also made local delivery companies reluctant to travel so far out of town. The first problem was solved when Esmée and René took up residence at their respective schools, but this soon presented a new problem.
As the children grew older they began to resent the isolation of Windrush Hill and crave the excitement of the city that their school friends enjoyed as a matter of course. By 1945 all of these various problems made it clear to Mazo that she would have to abandon her dream of a country estate and move into the city. It could have been worse. The family’s financial stability meant that they had their pick of virtually any house in Toronto. They first moved to a house on Russell Hill Road before finally settling into another Tudor-style house that still stands at 3 Ava Crescent in Forest Hill — the same crescent where Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris lived until he left Ontario in 1934. (His awe-inspiring art deco mansion still stands at 2 Ava Crescent.) Caroline and Mazo’s days at Windrush Hill had been eerily book-ended by the Second World War.
Mazo de la Roche’s last days were dominated by her health problems, although she never let her fans see her suffer. She died in 1961 after spending the last months of her life in a wheelchair. She died working on the seventeenth Jalna novel. In her lifetime she sold an astonishing ten million books. She was once the most widely read author in all of France and was so revered in Norway that people named their children and pets after characters in her novels. Her books were bestsellers in the United States and have never gone out of print in Great Britain, where even members of the Royal Family have proven to be devoted fans. Queen Mary once requested a signed copy of The Master of Jalna; a request that Mazo was only too happy to honour with a one-off, hand-tooled leather volume that she designed and paid for herself. Years later, King George VI declined the offer of a Jalna novel, saying that both he and the Queen had already read it. Their daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, was also a fan of these remarkable books that piqued her early interest in the dominion she would one day rule. Mazo often said that the only country in the world that never appreciated her was Canada — to which thousands of other Canadian artists would add a resounding “Amen.” Interestingly, her books are currently being kept in print in Canada and have become very popular as e-books.[1] The spirit of Mazo de la Roche is now very much alive for a whole new generation of readers.
Shortly before she died, Mazo de la Roche wrote an account of her life that curiously ended with her arrival at Windrush Hill. Perhaps this was her way of refusing to accept the fact that she had been unable to import and maintain the English country lifestyle she had tried so hard to reconstruct in her native country. One of her biographers, Ronald Hambleton, who was often thwarted by her family in his effort to tell her story, once said that “her chief significance is as ‘the last mourner for the dying English influence in Canada.’”[2]
Mazo de la Roche was laid to rest in 1961 in the breathtakingly beautiful cemetery of St. George’s Anglican Church on Hedge Road, just east of Jackson’s Point, high on a cliff overlooking the blue waters of Lake Simcoe. A stained glass window in the church, depicting St. Francis of
