Novel
Jalna
Mazo de la Roche · 1927
Synopsis
Southern Ontario, in the mid-twenties. Three generations of Whiteoaks live under the same roof at Jalna, an estate built by an officer returned from India. The matriarch Adeline, nearly a hundred years old, rules the house through the threat of a will that she revises at her pleasure. Renny, the eldest, runs the farms. Eden, who writes verse, brings back from New York a reader from a publishing house whom he has just married. Piers, for his part, has secretly married Pheasant, the daughter of Maurice Vaughan. The new alliances collide with an order that no one has the right to question.
Context
The novel first appeared as a serial in the Atlantic Monthly, from May to October 1927: it had won the first novel competition organised by the Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, with a prize of ten thousand dollars, and was published in book form by Little, Brown the same year. A sequel followed two years later, then fourteen more volumes up to 1960, covering a century of the same family; in the chronology of the series, this volume is the seventh.
Who it is for
This volume, published first, can be read on its own; the internal chronology of the series begins earlier.
Prizes and reception
Nine million copies for the series, mostly outside Canada; adapted for the cinema in 1935, the stage in 1936 and twice for television.
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