Forgotten authors No 35: Mazo de la Roche

A favourite game is to ask friends to name their own forgotten author, and here's one that has come up time and again. Mazo de la Roche was a prolific Victorian Canadian, born in 1879 in Ontario. She became the author of a popular series of novels, and remains a Canadian icon, but her books are almost unknown in the UK. Roche was a lonely and often unwell child, the daughter of a struggling salesman, and like many children in similar situations, she became the creator of a rich fantasy world. In Roche's case, however, this world was populated and coloured in a detailed, complex vision that led her, belatedly, to write romantic fiction.

Her first two efforts fared poorly, but her talent was soon recognised. When her third novel, Jalna, won a valuable Atlantic Monthly literary prize, she realised her dream (at the age of 48) and began to expand upon her fantasy world of rural aristocracy. Jalna became one of the greatest romantic bestsellers of its time, and was extended into a set of 16 novels also known as The Whiteoak Chronicles, which covered a century of family life.

Roche took her characters' names from gravestones, but their story was her own writ large, with the recurring theme of a frequently unemployed father, a sick mother and an orphaned cousin brought to safety and stability by the anchor of a family home. In reality, Roche lived reclusively with her younger cousin, and raised two children with her, finding happiness here and in her books, after a difficult, crowded and impoverished start in life.

The Jalna books became a Hollywood movie, a play and a television series. They were so successful that Roche expanded her vision, delving further back into the history of the household to give her readers more background to the tribulations of the Whiteoak family. In Britain, the books were issued by Pan with classic romance covers, usually depicting a headstrong, windswept girl collapsing into the muscular arms of a fit chap with an aristocratic jaw. The books were less popular in their native land than in Europe and America, mainly because Canadians found little of their country reflected in the stories, which followed a European tradition of romantic wish-fulfilment, while late lapse into sentiment and formula resulted in Roche's loss of popularity. But now she is considered to be a national treasure in her homeland.