With the jingle of sleigh bells came the first hint her life was about to change forever. Right up until that moment in the winter of 1886, Maisie had been a very lonely little girl. Her father was a travelling salesman, rarely home. Her mother was desperately ill, confined to her bed after a crippling case of scarlet fever, her chronic sickness hanging over the house like death. Even when they were all living there at her grandparents’ house in Newmarket, with plenty of adults around, little Maisie was mostly left to her own devices. She became a voracious reader, devouring books like Through the Looking Glass, Oliver Twist, and Little Women (though she liked Little Men better), and spent long hours developing her own rich fantasy world. She called it “The Play”: a fictional universe populated by pirates, explorers, and soldiers; a detailed dream world she would act out every day, bringing the characters to life all by herself, making those lonely hours a little less lonely. But that changed with the sound of the sleigh bells. A bay mare trotted up the snowy driveway pulling a big red sled, and her uncle George walked through the front door carrying something bundled up in shawls.
That something, it turned out, was another little girl. Her cousin, Caroline Clement.
“Although I did not realize it at the time,” Maisie would write decades later, “or for many years afterward, that January day was the most important day of my life.”
Clement would become her adopted sister and her best friend, welcomed into her fantasy world. “I have a secret,” Maisie told her on the first day they met. “My play I call it. But now it must be our play.”
There were six characters at first, all men and boys, but in time the dream world expanded to include more than a hundred different people, all meticulously imagined down to the smallest detail. They became a second life for the girls. “As we grew to know them better, we ceased to act them,” Maisie explained in her autobiography. “We were them. When surrounded by other people we strained toward the moment when we could be alone together. Then, at once, magic enveloped us. The outside world became unreal. The vivid reality was our Play.”
Their imaginations helped bond the two youngsters for life, even as they and their families moved around Ontario, eventually settling in Toronto. Bound together as girls, they became inseparable partners for the rest of their lives.
Maisie Roche’s imagination continued to fuel her through her teenage years. And even as adults, she and Caroline kept building upon their fictional world. Eventually, it fed into Maisie’s work. By 1927, they were living in a boarding house on Yorkville Avenue as she put the finishing touches on her latest novel. Maisie Roche had become an author, giving herself the more poetic name of Mazo de la Roche.
Her new novel was the story of the Whiteoaks, a rich Ontario family who lived on a thousand-acre estate called Jalna. The book built upon the fictional world she and Clement had created as children, and borrowed details from their real lives. The Whiteoaks’ estate is said to have been inspired by a grand old manor called Benares, which still stands in Mississauga to this today, operated as a museum. At Jalna, the Whiteoaks lived a life akin to that of the English aristocracy, echoing Simcoe’s original vision for Upper Canada as an oasis of British class and sophistication. But behind the Whiteoaks’ refined exterior, the family kept secrets. They had scandalous thoughts and feelings, erotic dreams, illicit affairs, and passionate obsessions.
De la Roche used the book to play around with gender and sexuality. She’d never identified strongly with the female characters she created; when she and Clement played as children, it was the men de la Roche felt kinship with. “I always wished I were a boy,” she admitted. And so, in Jalna it wasn’t the heroine she saw as a reflection of herself, it was the swashbuckling male hero. “Renny appeals to me partly because he is someone for whom I have understanding and sympathy,” she once explained. “Never have I been completely at one with any female characters of mine. I might love them, suffer with them, but they were they and I was I.”
In the book, Renny has fallen deeply in love with the woman of his dreams. But his feelings are forbidden. He’s in love with his brother’s wife, Alayne — a character who was clearly based on Caroline Clement, with her shimmering hair, blue eyes, diminutive frame, and a mouth like a spring flower. They’re tempted by each other, and things get steamy. “The next moment, she found herself in his arms with his lips against hers, and all her sensations crushed for the moment into helpless surrender,” de la Roche writes of the characters she’d based on herself and her Caroline. “She felt the steady thud of his heart and against it the wild tapping of her own.”
“I had,” she once said of Jalna, “put the essence of myself into it.”
With the finishing touches on the novel finally done, de la Roche sent it away to be entered into an international writing competition held by the Atlantic Monthly. It was one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, not something a Canadian was supposed to win. But that’s exactly what happened.
The ten-thousand-dollar prize was a fortune at the time, a life-changing amount of money, but even more transformative than that, the victory launched de la Roche into superstardom. Jalna was a global hit; she was suddenly a literary giant. From the moment the news of her big win broke, splashed across the front page of the Toronto Star, she became an international sensation. The phone rang off the hook; knocks at the door brought a shower of flowers and telegrams. Reporters wanted to know everything about her.
But she wasn’t going to tell them. Mazo de la Roche had her secrets, too. With her fame exploding, de la Roche remained fiercely protective of her privacy. As the public appetite for revealing details about her life grew, she actively worked to keep those details secret. She liked to play games with the press, lying and evading questions. “Those whose work lies in the field of imagination,” she explained, “have no need to explain their actions, or failures, except to themselves.” Her own autobiography further obscured the truth, blurring the line between fact and fiction, as much a work of imagination as an intimate confession. Even the story of the day she met Clement, of the jingle bells and the red sleigh, seems to be twisted and embellished. The dates and details don’t match up, leaving historians to wonder how much of the tale was invented as a romantic founding myth for their relationship. When it came to Mazo de la Roche, you couldn’t take anything on face value.
To this day, historians can’t be sure about the true nature of her relationship with Caroline Clement. There’s no question the two cousins were soulmates. “I usually try to conceal how perfect I think she is,” the author once admitted. They spent their entire lives together. Clement was there at her side through all their most difficult days: the lean years before the author became famous; the depressions and electroshock therapy that followed her success. And when Clement nearly married a man, engaged to him for a few years, de la Roche was beside herself with jealously. “If I had broken with Mazo,” Clement admitted, “she would never had written another word.” She broke off her engagement. The two women stayed together.
Passionate female friendships were not uncommon at the time. Many women lived in what became known as “Boston Marriages” — a reference to the ambiguous relationship between two female characters in the Henry James novel The Bostonians — spending their lives together without marrying a man. Some, to be sure, were just close companions at a time when intense friendships between women were encouraged; others were lesbians forced to hide their sexuality.
A century after the city was founded, Toronto was still a very conservative place — and, in some ways, getting more so. The very same year that de la Roche remembers meeting Clement, the city elected a new mayor. William Holmes Howland was a member of the Orange Order, the son of a Father of Confederation, and a deeply conservative man. His campaign slogan would become an unofficial motto for the city: “Toronto The Good.” As the former head of a temperance society running in an election against a brewery owner, he promised to crack down on the consumption of alcohol. That message resonated with the public, especially women who saw booze as a root cause of poverty, drunken husbands, and domestic violence. For the first time in that 1886 election, some Toronto women were allowed to vote — as long as they owned property or were wealthy renters. With their help, Howland won.
But once he was in office, the new mayor wouldn’t just reduce the number of liquor licences; he’d also promised to strengthen law enforcement. Howland established the notorious Toronto Police Morality Squad to crack down on all kinds of vice. Initially led by the big Irish constable David Archibald — nicknamed “The Moral Man” — they would spend the next century stamping out “immorality” wherever they found it: drunkenness, sex work, and homosexuality were just a few of their targets. Once, they even shut down a play because the actors onstage kissed for too long. Toronto wasn’t an easy place to challenge notions of sexuality and gender.
But in her books, de la Roche was able to do just that. With the sequel to her big hit, she got even more bold. In Whiteoaks of Jalna, the black sheep of the family develops a relationship with another man. But Finch is bullied by his older brothers when they discover what seems to be a love letter between the two. “I’m disgusted with you,” one of them tells him, driving him to tears. The encounter leaves a troubling question ringing in Finch’s head: “What am I?”
“Finch was my alter ego,” de la Roche explained. “I was one with Finch. For he and I have much in common.”
Whiteoaks of Jalna was just the first of fourteen sequels. In the 1920s and ’30s, the series was everywhere: a major multimedia franchise and a household name. As the Jalna empire grew bigger, de la Roche and Clement grew even more inseparable, sharing the most important parts of the author’s life and career. Caroline seems to have become her uncredited co-author, fleshing out Mazo’s ideas as she typed up the writer’s handwritten pages. They even adopted a pair of children together: a little girl and a baby boy. To this day, it’s not clear where the children came from, or how, back in the 1930s, two women were able to adopt them. While rumours swirled, de la Roche stuck to her usual secrecy, sharing different stories with different people. She refused to tell anyone, even the children themselves, the truth about their origins.
But one thing, at least, was clear. Clement would forever be the centre of de la Roche’s world. She’d made it clear she had no interest in ever leaving her for a man. “It was not in me to be the sort of female who knows no boredom, no fatigue, as long as she can trail after the man she fancies,” she explained in her autobiography, adding, “An attempt at handholding, a hand stealing toward my waist, was enough to make me fiercely withdraw.… There were insipient affairs of the heart [but] I retained a dislike of being touched.… I looked on sex as rather silly. There was so much that was more interesting.”
But to the readers of Jalna, there was no doubt Mazo de la Roche had an intimate understanding of passion and romance. “Only a few people ever know anything about love,” she once explained. “For the rest of them, they marry, bring up their children, and die. What they call love is nothing more than a habit. Real love is tremendous: tremendous in its power, tremendous in its force. It is a terrible thing that seizes you in its grip.… Love throbs into life within you. It overpowers your senses. Your being is aflame with it. It is of such love that I have written in Jalna.”
Clement stayed with her to the end. They spent their final years living together in Forest Hill — in a big Tudor-style mansion just across the street from Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris. By the time Mazo de la Roche died there as an old woman, her books had sold eleven million copies, had been translated into ninety-three languages, and had been adapted into movies, television programs, and a Broadway play. She was, without a doubt, one of the most successful Canadian authors who had ever lived.
Her secrets, she took with her to the grave. After de la Roche died, Caroline Clement performed one last act of love, fulfilling the final request of the woman she’d spent her life with. She gathered up the old writer’s papers: the diaries where she shared her innermost thoughts, the answers to all the questions everyone had ever wanted answered. And then she burned them. On a summer day in 1961, the secrets of Mazo de la Roche went up in flames.