Encountering
Gabrielle Roy

Biography

• Early Life
• Learning to Write
• Success
• Later Years

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Early Life

Gabrielle Roy was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba on March 22, 1909, in the house on Deschambault Street constructed in 1905 for the Roy family. The baby of the family, twelve years younger than Bernadette, the sister closest in age to her, Gabrielle would have the paradoxical position of being an only child in a large family. She was particularly close to her mother and this relationship would have an impact on all of her works.

In June 1929, Gabrielle Roy received her teacher's certificate but had already been teaching for a month as a substitute teacher at a school in Marchand, a small Métis village southeast of Winnipeg. She was then hired in Cardinal, at the other end of Manitoba, where she would teach all subjects to almost 40 children. Her first year of teaching, which she described as one of the most significant of her life, inspired some of the chapters of Street of Riches (1955) and Children of My Heart (1977).

After two years in Cardinal, Gabrielle Roy returned to St. Boniface, where she taught for seven consecutive years at the Provencher School, a boys' school very close to Deschambault Street. She had a class of immigrant children who, she wrote, "were a fair representation of Europe" and whom she taught in English.

In the summer of 1937, to boost her modest savings, she arranged to be assigned to a school in Little Waterhen, located not far from the village of Meadow Portage, almost 500 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

While working as a teacher in St. Boniface, Gabrielle Roy joined the Cercle Molière, a theatre troupe with an approach similar to that of the Compagnons de Saint-Laurent in Quebec. She later joined the Winnipeg Little Theatre, where she performed in supporting roles. Gabrielle Roy felt that the theatre "lets you step beyond your boundaries and experience something magical, where you can change your life and your destiny." In her autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow, she even hinted that this experience made her want to be a writer someday and create her own characters.

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Learning to Write

Gabrielle Roy travelled to Europe in 1937 to undertake further training as an actor. Her ambition had always been to find success despite her humble origins and she believed that she could achieve this in the theatre. At first she stayed in Paris and London, where she studied dramatic arts for several months. In 1938, in order to supplement her income, she submitted three articles to the Parisian periodical, Je suis partout, which accepted them for publication.

On her return from Europe shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, Gabrielle Roy was certain that she wanted to write. She decided not to return to her teaching job and to settle in Montréal, the only Francophone community in Canada where she could hope to earn a living as a writer.

She contributed to Le Jour and La Revue moderne in which she published columns, articles and short stories. Le Bulletin des agriculteurs, a flourishing monthly publication with a circulation of almost 100,000 copies, hired her as a reporter in 1940. Le Bulletin sent her to every corner of Quebec, from the Gaspé to Abitibi, and on visits to every ethnic community in the Prairies. Between 1940 and 1945, these trips produced approximately 20 short stories and around 50 articles.

While most women journalists of that era were assigned to the "women's pages," Gabrielle Roy travelled all across the country including to remote areas, somewhat like the famous American journalists Steinbeck and Hemingway. She was usually alone and acted without any apparent concern for her health and safety.

Working as a reporter allowed her to provide for her basic needs, but she appreciated it above all because it gave her enough free time to spend on her own writing, and consequently on her first book Bonheur d'occasion. This realist novel with considerable social commentary owes a lot to Gabrielle Roy's experience as a journalist, as she explained in an interview broadcast on Radio-Canada in April 1945: "The level of observation required in reporting, being true to one's subject and the variety of topics, seemed to me the best apprenticeship that one could have for learning how to write."

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Success

Bonheur d'occasion was published in 1945, two years after the death of Gabrielle Roy's mother to whom it is dedicated. This relatively anonymous reporter made a dramatic entrance onto the literary scene with this first novel, which, according to the young author, was inspired by the human suffering and distress that was so evident at the beginning of the war. Sadly her mother, who had so wanted her to achieve success, was no longer there to see Gabrielle Roy enjoying the life to which she had aspired.

Bonheur d'occasion achieved success that was unprecedented in the history of Canadian literature. On its release of the original French version in 1945 it received immediate critical acclaim.

In May 1947, the American translation of Bonheur d'occasion, The Tin Flute, was chosen as book of the month by the Literary Guild of America, the book club with the most subscribers in the world. Hollywood was also impressed and Universal Pictures bought the film rights for the book. Overnight, Gabrielle Roy had achieved recognition as a writer and found fame and fortune.

In English Canada, critics heaped praise on her work and the book was widely promoted, as evident from displays in bookshops and other store windows at the time. The English Canadian literary community considered it the first great urban novel that was truly Canadian.

Bonheur d'occasion was published in France by Flammarion in 1947. It received the Prix Fémina, the most prestigious French literary prize of the time, along with the Prix Goncourt. The Prix Fémina afforded Gabrielle Roy's novel international exposure. In the following years, the book was translated into approximately 15 languages.

After the success of The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy seemed torn about how to continue her writing. In France, where she was staying for a second time, and accompanied by her husband, Dr. Marcel Carbotte, existentialist novels were in fashion. Doubtless forced to follow the literary trend, the young writer started working on her book Alexandre Chenevert (translated in English as The Cashier) in 1947. It recounts the inner turmoil of an obscure bank employee in the face of universal misery and would take her almost eight years of painstaking work. The novel would finally appear in 1954, a considerable time after La Petite Poule d'Eau (1949) which was written in a completely different vein.

During a visit to Chartres, France, with a group of friends, Gabrielle Roy, who was having difficulty writing Alexandre Chenevert, recalled the island in Little Waterhen, where she had taught as a young teacher in a remote area of Manitoba. She recreated the "earthly paradise" of the area in her writing.

François Ricard, an authority on the works of Gabrielle Roy, points out that writing Where Nests the Water Hen allowed Roy to explore a new source of inspiration and imagination and another side to her writing, that of autobiographical fiction. This is also true for other novels such as Street of Riches, The Road Past Altamont and Children of My Heart. This "idyllic" approach to autobiographical fiction would become her preferred style, culminating in Enchantment and Sorrow, her actual autobiography which allows readers to reflect on her body of work from a new perspective.

In 1957, Gabrielle Roy purchased a modest country house in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François in the Charlevoix area on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. Here she would spend every year from late spring to early autumn. Surrounded by magnificent scenery, she found the tranquility and isolation that were necessary for writing. It would inspire the tales in Enchanted Summer, a peaceful work, filled with light, written shortly after the death of "her dear little sister" Bernadette. In it she tells of "the dazzling revelation of all things."

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Later Years

Begun in 1976 or 1977, the autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow was originally intended to have four sections. Only the first two sections of the book, entitled respectively "The Governor's Ball" and "A Bird Knows Its Song" were completed before illness forced Roy to stop working. Her archival records however contain three handwritten versions of the beginning of the third part of her autobiography.

In 1996, the last of these three versions was published posthumously in a collection entitled "Cahiers Gabrielle Roy", edited by François Ricard. Its title was Le temps qui m'a manqué, inspired by one of the first paragraphs in the text. The book opens with an account of the train journey that Roy takes to attend her mother's funeral in St. Boniface, and ends in the Gaspé, in the small boarding house in Port-Daniel where the young woman took refuge to mourn her mother and work on the book that would become The Tin Flute.

Several critics and commentators have underscored the fact that Roy's autobiography ends at the point where her writing career began, which in some way marks the culmination of her work. Enchantment and Sorrow was a huge success.

Gabrielle Roy died from heart failure on July 13, 1983, in the hospital Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.