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In 1930, after that first year of teaching, she was offered a permanent position in St. Boniface. Mélina was thrilled that her daughter had not only secured a job in the midst of the Depression, but that it was also a position in her home town. Gabrielle Roy was the only one among her eight siblings who held a full-time position during the Depression. Perhaps this was why everyone thought it so absurd when Gabrielle decided that she wanted to go to Europe for a year with the meagre savings she had managed to accumulate throughout her seven years teaching in St. Boniface. When asked, she would tell people that she was going to France and England to study Drama. She had been a member of a drama troupe, Le Cercle Molière, throughout her teaching years. Gabrielle's dramatic flair, accompanied by the experience with her theatre group, made her announcement of studies in drama understandable, if not acceptable. Her mother was particularly opposed to the idea, as she thought her youngest child would be better off holding on to her coveted teaching position. Nevertheless, Gabrielle was so determined that she took a teaching post in the summer of 1937 to gain enough to survive in Europe.

Although she had first planned to remain in Europe only one year, her stay soon stretched into two years, and may very well have lasted longer, had the second World War not been looming. While in Europe, she stayed for a time with the Perfects. Their home became the sanctuary where Gabrielle made her first serious attempts at writing. She wrote a couple of articles and sent them to a French journal for publication. They were published, and perhaps this inspired confidence in Gabrielle, for when she returned to Canada in 1939, she resolved that, for better or worse, she was going to try her hand at writing. Yet, whenever she mentioned writing to her mother, Mélina argued that it was not a secure profession, and that Gabrielle would be much better off teaching. This may have been one of the reasons that Gabrielle decided to stay in Montreal, instead of returning to her mother in Manitoba. If she had gone back to Manitoba, she might have succumbed to her mother's pressure to return to teaching.

Although she described her time as a teacher as the most beautiful years of her life, her full potential would not have been realized. So, for the next six years in Montreal, Gabrielle earned her living as a freelance reporter. Her first novel Bonheur d'occasion started out as a newspaper article, but soon took on a life of its own and, prior to editing, ended up at over 800 pages.

Unfortunately, Mélina Roy died in 1943, two years before her daughter's acclaimed novel was published. Not only was Gabrielle greatly saddened by her mother's death, she also felt a sense of guilt for having stayed away from St. Boniface. Later in her life, she would find that it was often necessary to make a choice between her family and her work. Although Gabrielle's work often won her attention, her family members were never far from her mind. To make up for the lack of personal contact with her siblings, she wrote them often, and was prone to sending off cheques to help them out.

Sources
Roy, Gabrielle. Enchantment and Sorrow: The Autobiography of Gabrielle Roy. Translated by Patricia Claxton. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Limited, c1987. 414 p.
_________. Letters to Bernadette. Translated by Patricia Claxton. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Limited, c1990. 218 p.