A Couple Diary entries and One poem by Mazo to Caroline

Caroline, from First to Last: Mazo De La Roche
 by Barbara Grier alias Marily Barrow 
    [from Lesbian Lives by Barbara Grier. Reproduced with
permission from author]

  Thanks for increasing frankness in literature, we are beginning
to get a few honest biographies- particularly of literary lights.
It would be a pleasure to report that Ronald Hambleton's recent
biography of Mazo De La Roche belongs in that brave group.
Sadly, it does not.  However, reading it lead to my reading of
Mazo's own little heralded autobiographical efforts, and by
adding them to Mr. Hambleton's portrait in Mazo De La Roche of
Jalna, a very telling picture is formed.

  Miss De La Roche was deliberately one of the least "public" of
authors.  She was shunned in her own country, supposedly for her
"English" bias.  In turn, she loathed the United States, though
it was here that she had her greatest success.  She enjoyed lying
about her personal life to such an extent that it is nearly
impossible to separate truth from fancy.  She is more erroneous
legend today than human being.

  She was born January 15, 1879 and died July 12, 1961.  She was
an only, and a lonely, child.  She did not begin her professional
writing career until relatively late in life.  Her first novel,
Possession, was published in 1923, when she was forty-four years
old.  Just four years later she received the $10,000
Atlantic-Little, Brown award for Jalna, the first in the famous
Jalna series, with which she is identified.
 
  The critics, at least after Jalna was pubilshed, considered her
writing beneath criticism... Before she began the Jalna series,
she had written several novels and was considered one of Canada's
better writers in the naturalistic vein.

  The $10,000 which gave her the material freedom from worry that
she desperately needed, may also have shaped and directed her
career.  Some feel it may have trapped and killed her talent. 
[but at least it gave her the freedom to live as she chose.]

  During the 1930's, Mazo was a very popular writer.  Times and
interests change, and she was, in a sense, a World War II
casualty.  Except for a steadily dwindling coterie of fans, few
paid any attention to her during the last twenty years of her
life.  In view of this, we do owe Mr. Hambleton a debt for taking
them time to research and write about a subject he well must have
known would attract little interest.

  The real history of Mazo De La Roche began with her seventh
year when se first met her cousin, Caroline Clement.  Caroline
was also an only child, and worse, she was orphaned.  Mazo 
describes her first meeting with Caroline in her autobiography,
Ringing the Changes, as being the most important day in her life.
From that time on, these two were to live together until the
death of Mazo in 1961.

  In a chapter entitled "A Partnership in life," Ronald Hambleton
states that Mazo felt she owed her life and her writing almost
entirely to Caroline.  He goes on to say: "Caroline Clement was
almost Mazo's other self.  These two dissimilar, but perfectly
attuned persons, lived one of the most unusual and certainly most
productive partnerships in the history of literature.  Its length
alone, over seventy years without a separation longer than a few
months, and those at long intervals, distinguishes it from an
association like the Wordsworths, its fruitfulness from that of 
Swinburne and Theodore Watts-Dunton, its completeness as a family
from that of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for Mazo and
Caroline brought up two adopted children...

  During the years that Mazo was struggling to get started as a
writer, Caroline held down a clerical job.  After the award for
Jalna, Caroline was able to quit work and simply act as
housekeeper (a function she had always performed in addition to
her working full time). From 1928 to 1938, Mazo and Caroline
lived outside of Canada for the most part, primarily in England.

  In 1930, while on a trip, they learned of the death of friends
which left a little girl, two-and-a-half years old, and a
thirteen-month-old baby boy orphaned.

  Mazo was fifty-one years old, much past the age usually 
associated with adoption.  Caroline was just slightly younger
(her age is not known).  Mazo raised heaven and earth doing it,
but with the aid of one of her publishers, she put up the
necessary arguments as to character and means and got the two
children.

  With the exception of her popular success during the 1930's, 
little of excitement happened to Mazo De La Roche.  She and
Caroline lived quietly, had few friends, and certainly no close
friends.  They raised their two children (both [of their 
children] are married and have families of their own now).

  Mazo was shy, and were quiet.  Her one outward expression of
temper was to refuse to go anywhere when Caroline was not also
automatically invited.

  What a different pair these Canadian ladies of Llangollen were,
despite the tremendously similar basic relationship.  One wonders
what literary history will make of them one hundred years from now?

	Bibliography
  Mazo De La Roche. Beside a Norman Tower. Boston: Little, Brown,
1934.
  Mazo De La Roche.  Portrait of a Dog. Boston: Little, Brown,
1930.
  Mazo De La Roche. Ringing the Changes; An Autobiography. 
Boston: Little, Brown, 1957. (Dedication reads: "For Caroline,
From First to Last.")
  Mazo De La Roche.  The Very House.  Boston: Little, Brown,
1937.
  Ronald Hambleton.  Mazo De La Roche of Jalna.  N.Y.: Hawthorne
Books, 1966,1967.
{I have listened to _The Building of Jalna_ on Books on Tape and
found it very entertaining and amusing.  It is not about lesbians
but it is still very good.}