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Gabrielle Roy

Gabrielle Roy was born in March 1909 in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, the youngest of eleven children. Her mother and father, then, were relatively old at the time of her birth -- 42 and 59 respectively. Like Christine's father in Rue Deschambault (Street of Riches), Léon Roy worked as a colonisation officer for the Department of Immigration, a position he held between 1897 and 1915. His politically motivated dismissal occurred six months before his retirement, thus leaving Roy with no pension to support his family. The family's financial predicament during Gabrielle's youth precluded any chance of her attending university, despite having earned stellar marks throughout high school which put her as one of the top students in the entire province. In 1927, after graduating from grade twelve, she enrolled at the Winnipeg Normal Institute where she completed her teacher training.

After teaching in the rural communities of Marchand and Cardinal, where she taught for a year, Roy returned to Saint-Boniface. There she accepted a teaching job at the Académie Provencher boy's school, a position she held from 1930-37. During this period, Roy began actively pursuing her interest in acting and joined the Cercle Molière theatre troupe. Her experiences as an actor inspired her to leave her teaching position and travel to Europe to study drama. Spending between 1937 and 1939 in Britain and France, the fluently bilingual Roy studied acting for six months before concluding that she did not desire to pursue a career in the theatre. In the meantime, she had also begun to write articles about Canada for newspapers in Paris and pieces on Europe for newspapers in Manitoba and came to realize that writing could be her vocation.

Returning to Canada, Roy settled in Montréal where she continued to work as a freelance writer, producing both journalism and short stories for Canadian publications such as Le Jour, Le Bulletin des agriculteurs, and the literary journal La Revue moderne. Perhaps the most formative influence on her later writing was the series she wrote on "Tout Montréal" for the Bulletin des agriculteurs. Focusing on the diversity, modernity, and complexity of this large urban centre, Roy's series also does not overlook the misery of the urban poor whose lives were anything but meliorated by economic and industrial "progress." This very notion, of course, is central to Gabrielle Roy's first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945).

Written over the course of three years, Roy's original manuscript spanned over 800 pages. After paring it down during May and June of 1944, Roy submitted it to Éditions Pascal, a new Montréal publisher, who agreed almost immediately to publish it. When the book finally came out in 1945, it met with a nearly instant success. Even the earliest reviews of Roy's début perceived not only that it was a novel of tremendous quality but also that it would be a seminal work in the history of French-Canadian literature. Centred around the lives of Montrealers Rose-Anna Lacasse and her daughter Florentine, Bonheur d'occasion was remarkable at the time for how it defiantly disengaged itself from the sentimental and idealized picture of Québec society painted by the tradition of the roman de la terre. Presenting a harshly realistic picture of the lives of many urban Quebeckers, Roy's novel helped to lay the foundation for the Quiet Revolution.

Bonheur d'occasion quickly became a bestseller and earned Roy many accolades, including the Prix Fémina. Published in English in 1946 as The Tin Flute, Roy's novel became equally popular in English Canada, winning the 1947 Governor General's Award for fiction as well as the Lorne Pierce Medal from the Royal Society of Canada. Roy also met with tremendous success in the United States where the Literary Guild of America, the nation's most prestigious book club, made The Tin Flute a feature book of the month in 1947. With over one million members, sales to the Literary Guild exceeded 700 000 copies. Later that year, Universal Studios in Hollywood purchased the film rights for $75 000, though they never did end up producing a film version of the novel.

It was also in 1947 that Gabrielle Roy met and married her husband, Dr. Marcel Charbotte. It was an unusual union to be certain, as it is now clear that Charbotte was homosexual and that their marital relationship was essentially a platonic one. Nevertheless, Roy and Charbotte clearly shared an affectionate respect for one another as they remained married until Roy's death in 1983.

After marrying, Roy and Charbotte spent three years travelling in Europe. Although Roy had already commenced writing a second novel set in urban Montréal -- what would eventually become Alexandre Chenevert -- she put this project aside during her sojourn in Europe, deciding instead to focus on her past experiences in Manitoba. Roy's second book, more a collection of three linked stories than an actual novel, was published in 1950. Unfortunately, though somewhat predictably, the book received neither the critical nor commercial success she had encountered with her first novel. The first of Roy's Manitoba books, La Petite Poule d'Eau (Where Nests the Water Hen), is set in the isolated area of Northern Manitoba where Roy taught school during the summer of 1937. Over the course of three episodes, Roy presents a tender and idyllic portrait of a rural life of innocence and harmony away from the demands and temptations of the wider world.

Alexandre Chenevert, published in 1954, stands in sharp contrast to the pastoral nature of her previous book. The story of an apparently unextraordinary bank teller who is afflicted with an extraordinary awareness of the problems of the society around him. A dark, poignant, and memorable novel, Alexandre Chenevert is one of the most important works of psychological realism to be written in Canada.

Roy continued the pattern of alternation between tales of experience and innocence in her next collection of linked short stories: Rue Deschambault (1955), translated in 1957 as Street of Riches. One of Roy's most popular books, Rue Deschambault spans the childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of the narrator, Christine, who lives with her family in Saint-Boniface. There are many autobiographical elements in this story, but it is the sympathetic portrayal of Christine's experiences and the development of her artistic insight that makes Rue Deschambault such an enjoyable book. Nearly as great a success as Bonheur d'occasion, the English translation of Rue Deschambault earned Gabrielle Roy her first Governor General's Award for Fiction (awards were still not given out to French language works at that time).

La Montagne secrète was published in 1961 and was followed a year later by the English translation, The Hidden Mountain. Unlike any of Roy's previous works, La Montagne secrète tells the story of Pierre Cadorai, an artist and trapper based loosely on the character of the artist René Richard, a personal friend of Roy's. An allegory of the artist's -- and likely Gabrielle Roy's -- never-ending quest to achieve an artistic ideal which is rarely, if ever, fully realized, Cadorai struggles throughout his artistic life to capture on canvas the spirit of a mountain he sees in Northern Québec. Frequently described as being an overly allegorical novel which does little to mask Roy's intention to elaborate her own artistic philosophy, La Montagne secrète was neither a great critical or popular success.

Roy's next book, La Route d'Altamont (1966), translated that same year as The Road Past Altamont returned to familiar ground: the life of Christine, the protagonist of Rue Deschambault. Comprised of only four stories, the books structure allowed Roy to treat her subject in greater detail and with more insight into Christine's development. While the novel received many positive reviews, the reaction was more one of respect than unbridled enthusiasm. Still, it remains one of Roy's more successful works. Roy's next work of fiction again played upon the fascination with the Arctic found in La Montagne secrète. Set among the Inuit communities in the Ungava region of Northern Québec, La Rivière sans repos (1970) is composed of three short stories and the title novella. The novella would later be published separately in English as Windflower (1970). Echoing some of the important themes of earlier works like Bonheur d'occasion and Alexandre Chenevert, each of the four tales deals in some way with the conflict between tradition and the modern world, between idyllic innocence and alienating experience.

In 1972, Roy published another collection of stories, Cet été qui chantait, translated as Enchanted Summer in 1976. A departure from her previous two collections, in which the longer stories allowed greater detail and character development, Cet été qui chantait is comprised of nineteen stories and sketches. These short, exuberant pieces all describe various aspects of an idyllic summer in the Québec countryside. Predictably, though, Roy does not continue along this pastoral vein for long. Her 1975 collection, Un jardin au bout du monde, returns to the prairies and, in four stories, deals with the lives of characters from four different minority communities. Imbued with a simple yet poetic realism, these stories are sympathetic portraits which capture the dignity of these characters as they struggle to find their place in a sometimes complicated and hostile setting.

The subject matter of Roy's final work of fiction, Ces Enfants de ma vie (1977), returns to her experience as a teacher in rural Manitoba. This collection, which earned Roy her third Governor General's Award, is comprised of a series of sketches, each focusing on a single student. The English translation of Ces Enfants de ma vie, Children of my Heart, was published in 1979.

By this time in her career, few of Roy's regular readers would have known of her work as a journalist. That changed with the publication of Fragiles lumières de la terre (1978), published in English four years later as The Fragile Lights of Earth. A collection of non-fiction writing spanning her entire career, the book contains among other things, some of her pieces on immigrant communities on the prairies as well as her work on urban Montréal, all of which were significant sources of inspiration for some of her later works.

While Roy ceased publishing works of fiction during the last decade of her life, she did publish three new books for children: Ma vache Bossy (1976), Courte-Queue (1979) and, published after her death, L'espagnole et le pékinoise. Also published posthumously was the first volume of her autobiography, La Détresse et l'enchantement (1984), later translated as Enchantment and Sorrow (1987). Also published posthumously was a volume of letters she had written to her sister over the course of approximately twenty-five years.

Over the course of her lengthy and prolific career, Gabrielle Roy received many honours, including three Governor General's Awards (1947, 1957, 1978), the Prix Fémina (1947), the Companion of the Order of Canada (1967), the Medal of the Canada Council (1968), the Prix David (1971), and the Prix Molson (1978).

Gabrielle Roy died on July 13, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.

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