Biography
Gabrielle Roy was the youngest of eleven children of Leon and Melina Roy, eight of whom survived to maturity. For eighteen years, her father had been a federal Department of Colonization agent, helping immigrants settle in the Prairie Provinces. He was dismissed in 1915 by newly elected Conservatives shortly before becoming eligible for a pension. Gabrielle grew up in poverty in St. Boniface, a largely French-speaking suburb of Winnipeg. Despite winning best-in-province medals in high school, university education was unattainable. She attended Winnipeg Normal Institute, graduating in 1929, and worked at several schools before being hired in 1930 to teach first grade at Winnipeg’s prestigious Catholic boys’ academy.
In September, 1937, having obtained a leave of absence, Roy sailed for Europe. Brief attendance at a London theater school ended dreams of becoming a professional actress. Three articles accepted by a Paris weekly convinced her that she could succeed as a French writer. Roy returned to Canada in April, 1939. Despite objections of her mother, who could not understand abandoning a secure, well-paying job during the Great Depression, as well as the anger of her sisters who thought she was selfishly evading contributing to family finances, Roy settled in Montreal as a freelance journalist.
Roy’s work pleased editors of Le Bulletin des agriculteurs, a general-interest monthly magazine circulating mainly in rural Quebec. During the next five years, they regularly commissioned articles. In 1941, to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of Montreal, Le Bulletindes agriculteurs published four essays in which Roy toured the city. She did not focus on poverty, but neither did she ignore it when visiting slums along Montreal’s waterfront.
Hoping that the drama and tragedy she sensed in slum life could be turned into literature, Roy began a short story in 1941 that grew into an eight-hundred-page manuscript. Published in French as Bonheur d’occasion in Montreal in 1945 and in English as The Tin Flute in New York and Toronto in 1947, Roy’s novel became a financial and public relations success previously unheard of in Canada.
Montreal critics praised the novel’s thematic freshness. Readers responded enthusiastically, requiring three new printings in the next twelve months. A New York publisher commissioned an English translation. The Literary Guild book club choose The Tin Flute as its May, 1947, Book of the Month, an unprecedented honor for a Canadian novel, guaranteeing unexpectedly large monetary returns. Hollywood signed a contract for a film, which was never made. In 1947, the novel received the Governor-General’s Award for fiction.
Roy visited Winnipeg in the summer of 1947 where friends celebrated her amazing success. While there she met, fell in love with, and married Marcel Carbotte, a gynecologist. They lived in France for three years. After 1951, they settled in Quebec City, where Carbotte established a successful practice. They had no children.
Publication in France followed the American triumph. Reviewers praised her depiction of urban life and found her use of Quebec colloquialisms fascinating. The climax of Roy’s success came with the award of the Prix Fémina in December, 1947, the first time a Canadian novel won a major French prize. Montreal literary circles were delighted to see France honor a Canadian book. Quebec nationalists disagreed, protesting that her portrait of slum life presented a negative image of French Canada to the world. With one book, Roy established herself as a major Canadian writer. The Tin Flute rapidly achieved the status of a classic of Canadian literature and became a favorite for academic analysis—the first M.A. thesis on the book appeared in 1949.
Roy found it difficult to produce the second...
(This entire section contains 949 words.)
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novel that her publishers expected and shelved early efforts in favor of stories drawing on her experiences teaching French Canadian pupils in northern Manitoba. Literary critics in Montreal and Paris expressed disappointment withLa Petite poule d’eau (1950; Where Nests the Water Hen, 1950), but the book proved popular with English-language readers who considered it a celebration of Canada’s pioneer heritage. With notes in English added, schools adopted it as a French-language text for English-speaking students.
Nine years after publication of her first novel, the French version of Alexandre Chenevert (1955; The Cashier, 1955) appeared in Paris and Montreal in 1955. Reviewers unfavorably compared this realistic study of urban middle-class anxieties to The Tin Flute. Quebec critics were harshest, yet the book sold better there than elsewhere. Her final urban novel became another favorite text for academic analysts.
More popular with Canadian readers were two collections of semiautobiographical stories describing a young French Canadian girl growing up in Manitoba—Rue Deschambault (1955; Street of Riches, 1957), which won Roy a second Governor-General’s Award in 1957, and La Route d’Altamont (1966; The Road Past Altamont, 1966). However critics and book buyers in the United States and France showed little interest, and after 1966, her New York publisher rejected later books.
Growing Canadian cultural nationalism helped boost Roy’s popularity, since her stories exemplified multiculturalism and the ethnic mosaic view of nationality that Canadians preferred to the “melting pot” image. La Montagne secrète (1961; The Hidden Mountain, 1962) and La Rivière sans repos (1970; Windflower, 1970) were situated in arctic Quebec, the latter narrating the tribulations of an Inuit woman raped by an American soldier as she struggled to raise her son. Un Jardin au bout du monde (1975; Garden in the Wind, 1977) featured four different minorities; the title story described efforts of a Ukrainian housewife to grow flowers on the Great Plains.
Roy’s fictional work Ces enfants de ma vie (1977; Children of My Heart, 1979), which went back in time to her experiences teaching children in Manitoba, was a complete triumph, a best seller hailed by critics as a significant contribution to Canadian literature. The novel won for Roy an unprecedented third Governor-General’s Award.
Biography
Gabrielle Roy’s first novel established her enduring reputation as a major Canadian author. Her books exerted a powerful influence on later Canadian writers, encouraging them to deal realistically with Canadian life. The novels continued in print in both French and English editions into the twenty-first century, and her readers remained enthusiastic. Roy’s childhood home was turned into a museum, and an admirer leads walking tours of the places in Montreal described in her novels. When the Bank of Canada in 2004 introduced a new twenty-dollar bill designed to honor arts and culture, it included a quotation from Roy on the back of the bank note.
Biography
Born into a large Roman Catholic, French-speaking family in Manitoba, Canada, Gabrielle Roy was educated in the French language at a time when French Canadians were considered by many to be second-class citizens of their native land. She was a gifted student who also became proficient in English while in school. For a time she aspired to an acting career and participated in a French-speaking theater group in Manitoba. Having to earn a living, however, she chose to enroll in a teacher-training program at the Winnipeg Normal Institute. This led to appointments in several elementary schools, including one in the most remote region of the province. Whatever the hardships, this remoteness would prove invaluable for her second novel, Where Nests the Water Hen.
A youthful Roy began to feel that Canadian provincialism was a burden, so she left Canada for Europe, living in both France and England for extended periods of time. During this stage of her life, like many other gifted North American artists who lived for a time in Europe, she studied drama and wrote reflective sketches of Canadian life. When she returned to North America, she was ready to concentrate on her literary calling. At the age of thirty-eight, she married Marcel Carbotte. Although initially the couple appeared to have much in common, and though they spent three years together in France—where Carbotte acquired his medical specialization in gynecology—they spent the last years of their marriage living separately. They had no children, and Roy always referred to her books as her progeny.
By 1952, Roy established residence in Quebec City, which she regarded as the Francophone center of North America. She continued to write and took an active part in the English translation of her books. Frequently consulted on matters of Canadian culture, she was selected to serve on the panel that gave Expo 67 its central theme. It was her proposal, “Terre des hommes,” which was inspired by the title of a 1939 book by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, that led to the exhibition’s theme. Roy died in Quebec City in 1983 at the age of seventy-four.
