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Heather Kirk says that while writing her new book speculating on Mazo de la Roche's inspiration for the fictional characters, the property and the home that became the world-famous Whiteoaks of Jalna series, she "felt a little bit like Hetty Wainthropp."
Scholarly research is probably 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration. The real detective work is in slogging through archives and land registry offices and perusing old newspapers until you can't see straight.
After weeks of finding nothing, something critical will turn up.
That happened a couple of times for Kirk, the Barrie freelance author who has been fascinated with Mazo since she started working on her doctorate some 20 years ago.
Of course Mississauga lays some claim to Mazo because she wrote much of the first books at her summer home called Trail Cottage, not too far south of the Benares Museum on Clarkson Rd. N.
That house, now Province-owned and City-run, has long been suspected of being much of the inspiration for Jalna. The Harris family which owned Benares is commonly assumed to be the model for the Whiteoaks.
While examining the will of the grandfather of Caroline Clement, the cousin and life-time companion of de la Roche, Kirk discovered that he had owned 1,000 acres of property in Innisfil Township on a real-life property that bore a startling resemblance to the farm of the Vaughan family. They live next to the Whiteoaks in the Jalna novels.
The resemblance was amazingly striking, right down to the fact that both the real and fictional farms featured houses lying in a shallow basin on land rising from a ravine.
"That was the beginning. Slowly other parallels began to emerge," Kirk says.
Over 135 pages of maps, photos and comparisons between the fiction and the fact, Kirk slowly beats the reader down — even we Mississaugans who want to lay emotional claim to the Jalna stories. (We do have the street names, after all.)
By dint of the weight of her research, we are duly convinced by the end of proceedings that Jalna and Whiteoaks are, indeed, a clever melding of the many places de la Roche and Clement lived and the people they knew.
Less convincing is Kirk's attempt to minimize the importance of the relationship between de la Roche and the Harris family.
It's fair to ask why this theory is being advanced some 46 years after de la Roche's death and several biographies.
"She was secretive, protective and evasive," says Kirk plainly. Previous biographers weren't diligent enough in following the clues or were sidetracked by the phony ones. Many of the answers lay in de la Roche's biography, Ringing The Changes. "It took me a while but I finally began to trust her more," says Kirk.
In one of the jacket blurbs for the book, Professor John Lennox of York University, calls the effort invaluable for scholars and, "probably the definitive piece of work on de la Roche's family connections and on their possible links with her fiction."
It was back in a graduate course Kirk took from Lennox in 1986 that students were asked to select and write on a Canadian author.
"When her name came up people were pooh-poohing her," says Kirk. "She was a popular writer and therefore, not worthy. That's when I decided – I'll take the long shot."
She read Jalna and realized, "I recognize these people. They were my family."
Literally, as it turned out. Kirk discovered she was a fifth cousin, twice removed of de la Roche's.
One thing still hasn't changed from those days, which is the underestimation of the novelist's skills and importance and the public pooh-poohing of her legacy.
"She was a forerunner of Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood, writing about her childhood from Canadian memories. She was the first generation of writers born here to write from the Canadian experience," says Kirk.
"She made a substantial contribution. Not all of the novels are great but the first two are solid, first-class novels. Many would include a third novel, Delight. Many of her short stories are outstanding. She achieved a level of popularity unheard of in Canada.
"Her books represented Canada to the world for a generation and that's why it's so important to understand this complex person."
The book is available at Chapters and other local stores.
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On vacation next week. Back Dec. 3.