Mazo de La Roche: The Hidden Life - Tapa dura

Mazo de la Roche leapt to prominence as one of the most successful writers of the twentieth century when the first novel in her Whiteoaks of Jalna series won the Atlantic Monthly prize in 1927. She went on to write sixteen novels in the Jalna series as well as numerous other novels, short stories, and children's books. De la Roche has a genius for producing undemanding yet fascinating narratives that grew out of an adolescent daydream. In this biography Joan Givner has recovered, with great insight, the hidden life of Mazo de la Roche.

Critics balked at the Gothic excesses of her plots and the sexually bizarre adventures of her characters, which they saw as products of the feverish imagination of an unmarried woman with little experience of the world. Yet all Mazo's fictions were firmly rooted in her own experience.