Mazo & Sister

When the Atlantic Monthly held its first prize novel contest 23 years ago, a flood of 1,150 manuscripts engulfed the editorial staff; extra readers were hired to weed out the hopeless entries. Into the rejects went a manuscript titled Jalna, written by a Canadian woman named Mazo de la Roche. Its handsome binding caught the eye of one of the Atlantic's regular editors. He picked the manuscript out of the discard, glanced at it and did not stop reading until he had finished it. Jalna won the contest's $10,000 first prize.

Last week, Author de la Roche and the saga of Jalna, a mythical 19th Century estate in southern Ontario, were still making literary news. Mary Wake field (Atlantic--Little, Brown; $3), Miss de la Roche's eleventh novel of the Jalna series, was published in the U.S. The Literary Guild chose it as the Guild selection for February (for March in Canada) and expected Mary Wakefield to sell 500,000 copies. That would push the sales of Miss de la Roche's novels (now translated into a dozen languages) near the two-million mark.

Old Pattern. Tall, henna-haired Mazo de la Roche had written Mary Wakefield in the pattern of other Jalna novels. The setting was southern Ontario, where Mazo herself was born about 60 years ago ("I am not old enough to be proud of my age") and it was written not far from the countryside the author described.

Miss de la Roche lives on a quiet Toronto street in a red brick house shaded by poplar trees. There at 9 o'clock every working morning, with a writing pad on her knees, she scribbles out her story. By noon, as much as 1,000 words are written and ready to be transcribed by a secretary. Then Mazo, accompanied by her poodle, Chrysanthemum, goes for a long-striding walk before lunch.

Mazo lives with her longtime friend, small, blond Caroline Clement. In the early '20s, before the Jalna series started, Caroline (whom Mazo calls "sister") was an Ontario civil servant. Her earnings helped tide Mazo over the years when her first three novels made no money.

Old Friends. While Mazo sits with her writing pad, Caroline looks after Mazo's two adopted children, hunts for antique furniture, old silver and brocades, shops for Mazo's clothes. Another of Caroline's tasks is to ward off callers. Says sister Caroline: "Her hobby is privacy."

The one intrusion that Author de la Roche welcomes is her daily bundle of mail, with letters from Jalna readers all over the world. In last week's mail was a hand-tooled notecase from D.P.s in a camp in Germany. Other letters came from Dutch people whose farms were flooded, from Frenchmen who lived out the Nazi occupation. Most correspondents write wistfully of the serenity of Jalna manor and the abundant life of its people.

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