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The autobiography of Gabrielle Roy, published in French a little more than a year after the novelist died at the age of 74, provides a fascinating insight into her first 30 years, when she lived in the same obscurity as her best-loved fictional characters.

La Detresse et l'enchantement. (the anguish and the enchantment) takes Roy from her poverty-stricken childhood in the French-speaking community of St. Boniface, just outside Winnipeg, through an eight-year career as a teacher in Manitoba schools and then overseas for two years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Only on returning to Canada in 1939 did Roy stake her future on writing. In the book's closing scene, the friendless young woman is installed in a miserable rented room in a rundown area of Montreal with only $15, a typewriter and her own willpower.

However, for most of the preceding 500-odd pages, the book's vivid phrases portray Roy as anything but strong-willed: a feeling of insecurity seems to have afflicted her from birth, along with a strong sense of being stranded on society's shore.

FOCUS ON MOTHER

The book's first half focuses on Roy's life in St. Boniface and particularly on the author's mother, a woman whose life was spent in a never-ending battle against debts that threatened to inundate her large family like a swollen prairie river in spring.

The mother, who speaks only a few words of English, has to struggle to make herself understood when she ventures outside of St. Boniface to go shopping at a downtown Winnipeg department store, a humiliation that her young daughter silently promises to avenge.

But Roy, whose family was shaken when her elderly father lost his job as a federal colonizing agent because of his fidelity to the Liberal party of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, does not always show herself as whole-heartedly dedicated to the French-language cause.

In fact, Roy frequently laments "the misfortune of being French-Canadian" and can't shake the idea of homelessness that pursued her from her earliest days and throughout the two-year stay in France and England. It was a feeling that remained with her even when she settled in Quebec after returning to Canada.

WRITE MOVINGLY

Eventually, the sense of permanent displacement enabled Roy to write movingly about characters whose poverty left them strangers in their own land, such as her mother who made a costume especially for a lieutenant-governor's ball, then didn't dare to go inside because she was intimidated by the bright lights and wealth.

Source: Sudbury Star, Ontario, January 18, 1985.

Courtesy of The Sudbury Star.