So, a novel of playfulness, lyrical nostalgia, and affectionate irony may follow one of social protest or personal anguish. (Several photographs of Roy capture this same ambivalence: either something truly amusing has just caught her fancy or she has only momentarily been distracted from a brooding sorrow.)
Gabrielle Roy, born 22 March 1909 in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba (now part of Winnipeg), was the youngest of eleven children, eight of whom survived. Both her parents had come from Quebec, and her mother, the former Mélina Landry, kept the dream of Quebec alive with stories of the gentle hills and trees of St. Alphonse. Roy's father, Léon, from the village of Beaumont, became an agent for the federal Department of Colonization in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The tranquillity and security of village life in Saint-Boniface and the beckoning immensities of prairie sky and land had an equally strong effect on the young Gabrielle's imagination.
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