Gabrielle Roy: A Life

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Franзois Ricard quite rightly sees Gabrielle Roy as one of the major
writers of the latter half of the 20th century. Those who know Roy from
her fiction and memoirs, works such as The Tin Flute and The Fragile
Lights of Earth, know that she wrote of humankind’s pain and solitude
redeemed, in her vision, by love and hope. Ricard’s biography does
justice to an exceptional life and literary vision.

Ricard, a Montrealer and a professor of French literature at McGill
University, won a Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in the
1980s. From the early 1970s on, he was Roy’s agent, assistant, and
friend. His definitive and exceptionally fine account of this literary
giant and extraordinary woman has been more than 10 years in the making.


Roy (1909–83), the youngest of eight children, was born into a
middle-class family in St. Boniface and lived in Manitoba until 1937.
She was profoundly influenced by the immigrants who settled Western
Canada in the early 20th century and by the prairie landscape that she
celebrated in Where Nests the Water Hen and other works. Ricard’s
early chapters, especially “Daughter of Immigrants” and “A
Singular Childhood,” depict the complexity and the contradictions of
her family background that helped to shape the polarities of joy and
sorrow in her writing.

Translator Patricia Claxton, who won the Governor General’s Award for
her translation of Roy’s autobiography, Enchantment and Sorrow, writes
in a prefatory note that Richard has resoundingly achieved his stylistic
goal of pleasing both the general reader and the scholar. Claxton
herself has successfully managed a shift in style from the rather more
formal academic language used by Ricard and enjoyed by many francophones
to the freer style preferred by English-language readers.

This long, meticulously researched biography comes from its author’s
mind and heart. His sources run to 23 pages of smallish print and
include, as one would expect, the personal recollections of many of
Roy’s friends. A splendid portrait.