It's no wonder that the working title for the documentary that director Maya Gallus wants to make about Mazo de la Roche is entitled, "The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche."
Gallus, a principal in Toronto's Red Queen Productions who has already made well-received documentaries about author Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), the Dionne Quintuplets and skating legend Barbara Ann Scott, was there filming at the ceremony Saturday at which a first-ever plaque in Mississauga from the Historic Sites and National Monuments Board of Canada was celebrated.
After decades of benign neglect of her incredibly popular Jalna series, de la Roche is enjoying an unprecedented revival.
Her books are in print in English again in Canada for the first time in years (Interestingly, they were never out of print in Québec), a new biographer has stripped away more layers from the trail of red herrings she created in her "autobiography" and now she may become the subject of a documentary by Red Queen, which would be financed by both the National Film Board and Bravo Television.
As Museums of Mississauga Manager Annemarie Hagan outlined in a brilliant evocation of the intentionally unfocussed de la Roche persona at Saturday's event, "it's important to realize that confusion about her personal life is exactly what Mazo always intended — after all, she once listed 'privacy' as her only hobby." This is a woman who managed to write an autobiography that did not give her birth date, changed her name from Maisie Roach to the much more literary-sounding Mazo de la Roche and, "took great care to throw shadows over many aspects of her own, real life," as Hagan put it.
This obfuscation actually made aid in her storytelling exercise, says Gallus, because much of her film will involve peeling back the numerous layers of gossamer that de la Roche drew across her trail.
The subtext of her complex relationship with her lifelong companion and cousin Caroline Clement is yet another fascinating sidebar to the main story. It was Clement who supported the two by working at the Toronto's Fire Marshal's office while de la Roche spent her days writing madly in their "ridiculous little cottage within its beautiful silver birches and pines, trailing arbutus and other wildflowers" in Clarkson.
De la Roche is a "walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction" as the songwriter might say. She suffered frequent bouts of depression and was deeply wounded by negative reviews, yet was far ahead of her time in handling her own business affairs and demanding her fair due from publishers.
"She was very comfortable in what was largely a man's world," says Gallus, at a time when women were still treated largely as babies. "She had enormous courage and great faith in herself."
She had an absolute compulsion to write and was "driven" to write the Whiteoaks saga, creating in the process, one of the truly great characters in the Canadian literary canon in Granny Whiteoaks.
Ultimately, as Hagan pointed out, it all comes down to the books. It doesn't matter whether Benares, or other houses, were the models for Jalna because the family she created in them is still so real. "The real Jalna and the real Whiteoaks do exist. They really do," said Hagan. "They aren't even hard to find. Mazo handed them to us on a silver platter - or perhaps I should say - between the covers of the 16 books she wrote about the Whiteoaks."
Maybe there's so much speculation about which house was Jalna, adds Gallus, because the way Mazo draws it up, "the house of Jalna is actually one of the characters. She is so very contemporary in her writing as well, in the deep connection she makes with nature and animals," says the Toronto movie-maker. "Nature always plays a big part and each scene always includes a detailed description of the trees, the plants and the weather." No doubt, her experiences in the wild woods of Clarkson contributed there.
Mazo would have loved Saturday's event as the winds whipped, the rain fell and there was a distinct chill in the air, as she symbolically was given a long-overdue, warm embrace by the Canadian establishment.
One of those attending Saturday was Helen Wilson, now 85 and a museum volunteer. She grew up in Bayfield, Ont. and remembers that, because she was so tall for her age as a child, she could get into the "adult" section of the nearby Clinton library and check out the Jalna books.
"They were so delightful," said Wilson, who now lives in Port Credit. "I've just been rereading them, all 16," she told the museum historian with a delicious little laugh as she left the ceremony. "This time, I get it all."
The books remain compulsively readable. That may be the only reality of true consequence, when it comes to reviewing the life and times of Mazo de la Roche.