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GABRIELLE ROY
1909-1983

| The Early Years (1909-1929) | The Middle Years (1930-1944) |
The Later Years (1945-1983)

Gabrielle Roy was born on March 22, 1909 in St. Boniface, Manitoba. With deep auburn hair, and eyes of sea-green, her strong features became more pronounced with age, which gave her a stately and elegant quality.

Gabrielle was the youngest of eleven children born to Léon and Mélina Roy. Only eight of her siblings lived past adolescence. Her mother, Mélina, was a woman whom Gabrielle loved and cherished. She was the basis for many of Roy's strong mother-figures in her novels. Although the Roy family had to do without many material things, Mélina made sure that the family was surrounded by stories of hope. She passed her aptitude for story-telling on to her daughter.

Gabrielle's father was already 59 when she was born. Many of the other Roy children could remember him during happier times. He had worked for years resettling immigrants in Western Canada, a job which he enjoyed greatly. His affinity for diverse cultures influenced Gabrielle's writing, as her works often celebrated people's differences. However, in 1913 Léon was dealt a blow from which he never fully recovered. Six months before he was to retire and receive his pension, he was laid off.

For income, Mélina decided soon after that they would have to take in boarders. For such a proud family, this was a difficult sacrifice, yet necessary. The Roys had many financial problems during Gabrielle's formative years. In many of her works she focuses on the poverty-stricken; something she truly understood.

After having an emergency appendectomy at age twelve, Gabrielle felt guilty for the money her family would have to spend on her, so had she promised her mother the only thing she could; she told Mélina that she would come first in her class in both English and French from then on. Within a few years she was receiving numerous awards for her performance in both languages. She won enough cash awards from her final exams that she was able to pay almost completely for her first year at the Winnipeg Normal Institute.

In spite of his influences on her, Gabrielle had never felt close to her father. Yet, when he died in 1929, she realized that she had much in common with him. In her autobiography, she said of their relationship "The truth was that we were two of a kind, each living in fear of finding our poor, shy love for each other misunderstood." (Enchantment and Sorrow, p. 73)

Photo: Jessop

That same year she completed her schooling, and then spent a month teaching in the summer, before instructing for one year at a school near her Uncle Excide's home. During childhood, the summers Gabrielle had spent at her uncle's home had been a respite from the usual strain of her family's financial woes. As a new teacher, she once again found a refuge at her Uncle Excide's.