Mazo de la Roche was born in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, on January 15, 1879 (some sources cite 1885 due to her own obfuscation of her age).
Mazo de la Roche was born on January 15, 1879, in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, and originally named Maisie Roche. She was the only child of William Roche, a travelling salesman of Irish descent, and Alberta Lundy. Throughout her adult life, de la Roche was notoriously secretive about her exact birth year, and various biographical sources have listed dates ranging from 1879 to 1885; modern scholarship, however, generally accepts 1879 as the correct year based on baptismal and census records.
Her childhood was marked by frequent relocations across small towns in Ontario as her father pursued various business ventures, none of which proved particularly successful. This peripatetic upbringing, combined with a vivid imagination nurtured largely in isolation, contributed to her early inclination toward storytelling and fantasy. She was raised alongside her cousin Caroline Clement, who was informally adopted into the household after the death of her own mother, and the two women would remain inseparable companions for the rest of their lives.
De la Roche's early exposure to rural Ontario landscapes, genteel but financially precarious family life, and the social customs of the Anglo-Canadian gentry would later become the raw material for her most famous literary creation: the Jalna series, which chronicled generations of the fictional Whiteoak family on their Ontario estate. Her birth in this small Ontario town thus marks the origin point of one of Canada's most internationally celebrated literary careers of the twentieth century.
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