An Excellent Series to get into-- the "Jalna" books by Mazo de la Roche

Oznell · ‎11-08-2014

This is classic, fun summer reading--- and since there are so many in the series, it can extend into cozy fireside reading in the winter time!

A former British officer, Philip Whiteoak emigrates to Canada with his fiery Irish wife, Adeline, to settle the upper shore of Lake Ontario. They build a spacious manor called "Jalna" named after the miilitary station in India where Philip had lived.

The books follow the fortunes of this tempestuous, prominent family from the mid 1850's to a hundred years later, the mid- 1950's. They intensely identify with their land and house, almost in the way that the O'Hara's did in "Gone With the Wind".

Mazo de la Roche was a great eccentric, but her works became world famous, I think from the Twenties onward. She identified with the Whiteoaks, and based "Jalna" on a real British officer's gracious India-inspired home in Mississauga, Ontario, called "Benares". Hollywood made a movie based on the series, and there was a TV series as well.

The books are a cut above the usual pot-boilers of this type. De la Roche's intense feeling for the region she writes about, and the colorful, passionate characters, make the series quite memorable.

You don't have to read the books in order. My favorite is a few books in, called "Mary Wakefield". She's a governess whose life becomes entwined with her employers the Whiteoaks. The novels that are set in the Forties and Fifties are good too, suffused with a kind of hypnotic passion, and are an exploration of how more modern times are buffetting the family and the tight little patrician society they moved in....