After 80 years the secret was revealed! 

In 1927, a novel called Jalna by a Canadian author named Mazo de la Roche won a major international prize and became a bestseller. Jalna and its first sequel, Whiteoaks of Jalna, inspired a 1935 Hollywood movie. These books also formed the basis of the first Canadian play to be mounted on a professional stage in London, England.  Opening in April 1936, the play was a long-running hit.  It toured England and went to Broadway.

De la Roche wrote sixteen Jalna novels in total, all of them bestsellers. By the time de la Roche died in Toronto in 1961, eleven million copies of the Jalna books had been sold in 93 languages. These books had represented Canada to the world for a generation. 

The Jalna series was about a wealthy, aristocratic family surnamed Whiteoak who live somewhere in southern Ontario on an estate known as “Jalna.” De la Roche did not tell her readers what real people had inspired the fictional Whiteoak family or what real property had provided the model for Jalna. Fans could only guess. And they guessed wrong.

Finally, in 2007, the truth came out!

Who Were the Whiteoaks and Where Was Jalna? is an investigation into the sources of the Jalna novels of Mazo de la Roche.  Published in October 2007 by Tecumseh Press, a division of Borealis Book Publishers of Ottawa, Ontario, this 210-page book is lavishly illustrated with photos, maps, charts, and drawings.  It is the result of several years of careful research. 

What new information about the Whiteoaks and Jalna did Heather Kirk discover?

Contrary to popular belief, Mazo de la Roche did not base the Whiteoaks primarily on one or more of the prominent families of southern Ontario with whom she was superficially acquainted. The Whiteoaks were not the Beardsmores of Acton, the Harrises of Clarkson, the Magraths of Erindale, the Masseys of Toronto, the Oslers of Bronte, the Sibbalds of Sibbald Point, or the Warnocks of Galt.

The Whiteoaks were an ingenious combination of de la Roche’s own family and the family of her cousin, life-long companion, and co-creator, Caroline Clement.  These families were quite distinguished.  They included knights of the Middle Ages, Old World aristocrats, a famous theologian, pioneers of Colonial America, United Empire Loyalists, heroes of the War of 1812, avant-gard Quakers, rebels of the 1837 Rebellion, Manitoba politicians, and a well-known industrialist in British Columbia.  Even Laura Secord got into the mix!

The families of Mazo de la Roche and Caroline Clement owned large properties in York County and Simcoe County, north of Toronto. There were also important family properties in the Niagara region.  Several of these properties were combined to create Jalna!

Mazo de la Roche: Rich and Famous Writer
by Heather Kirk

Why rewrite Wacousta?  This tale of the famous Pontiac Uprising--the First Nations attacks on British forts on the Canadian frontier of 1763--was marvelously plotted and authentically detailed but inaccessible except to scholars of Canadian literature.

The problem was not availability, it was readability.  Several editions of Wacousta were in print, but John Richardson’s prose was dense and abstract. In short, he put the average contemporary reader to sleep.  By rewriting Wacousta, Heather Kirk made this old classic, first published in 1832, a fast-paced, exciting read.

“I struggled through the original Wacousta for a university class,” wrote Heather Butt. “This version is a breath of fresh air.” Ms. Butt is a Heritage Services Representative with Windsor’s Community Museum in Windsor, Ontario. 

“You have created a good novel that deserves a modern audience,” wrote Bob Garcia, Fort Henry Project Historian, Parks Canada.

A readable Wacousta fills a gap in what is available today in Canadian historical fiction. Most modern Canadian historical fiction gingerly sidesteps the greatest issue in Canadian history: the conflict between French and English. Wacousta illuminates the French-English conflict.

There is also a scarcity of material on early conflicts with First Nations peoples. Wacousta’s treatment of the Aboriginal point of view is intelligent.  Its villain is a British renegade whose evil is still relevant today.  Its principal heroes are the grown children of Chief Pontiac.

Richardson’s Wacousta is one of the best works of Canadian historical fiction ever written. It is a national treasure which captures Canada’s distant past magnificently. Also, the life of John Richardson, Canada’s first native-born novelist, a Métis and a soldier, is fascinating.  You can read about his life in David Beasley’s The Canadian Don Quixote (Simcoe, ON: Davus Publishing, 2004).

John Moss in his Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel says: “Wacousta is at the centre of the Canadian tradition.  Judged against Walter Scott’s historical romances or James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier romances, Wacousta is wondrously complex and enigmatic. Judged from a present perspective, within the tradition it so roundly represents, it is of major importance.”

Heather Kirk hopes her efforts in rewriting Wacousta will help lead to a renewed interest in the book and in Canadian history generally. 

“I think knowing one’s own culture, having a sense of the place, a sense of the past and of one’s own people is very important.  There isn’t enough of that.” So Heather told Paul Gessell of the Ottawa Citizen.

Warsaw Spring is a novel for young adults
set in Canada and Poland in the spring of 1979, the year before the Solidarity Uprising of August 1980. 

The novel explores the effects of the Second World War on the country most devastated by that war.  It examines the differences between capitalism and communism and points to how Poland eventually ended the Cold War
by toppling the Soviet regime.  It also tells the story of one young woman’s search for her father.

Warsaw Spring is the first of two linked novels.  Its sequel is titled A Drop of Rain.

Shunned by a social-climbing mother, raised by an overly-strict grandmother, eighteen-year-old Eva Goralski is the illegitimate daughter of a Polish war veteran whom she has never seen.  As the story begins, Eva is a student at an Edmonton high school. 

Bright and talented but troubled and questioning, she is not doing well at school, among peers, or at her part-time restaurant job.  Arguments with her Canadian family and a near rape by her employer finally compel Eva to run away to her father’s family in Poland.

In Warsaw, Eva meets an older half-sister she never knew she had.  This sister, Hanna, also has never seen their father.  Gradually, despite Hanna’s mysterious silences, Eva learns about the complex, painful, personal and national tragedy that led to their father’s disappearance from their lives. 

One of the ways that she learns is through a romance with a young, half-Jewish man, Mark, whose father is a highly placed member of the communist party.

Eva relives the Polish war experiences in Warsaw, Gdansk, and Auschwitz.  She absorbs the dignity of ancient Cracow and the beauty of the Carpathian Mountains.  She comes to understand the mood of despair that grips the exhausted country now under the control of the Soviet Union. 

Eva witnesses the June 1979 pilgrimage to Poland of Pope John Paul II: the event that would ultimately spark the Solidarity Uprising.  She encounters true heroism in her sister Hanna and other women of her father’s family.

In her search for her father, Eva grows in strength as well as understanding.  She finds a place for herself in a bewildering but worthwhile adult world.  She experiences the love of family and friends.  She returns to Canada much changed for the better.

Research for Warsaw Spring included more than two years of residence in Poland, as well as many years of friendship with Polish people. Some of Heather Kirk’s poems and essays about Poland have been published in literary magazines.