[The] nature of Gabrielle Roy's vision has … cut her off both from her fellow artists and from the popular audience. The typical heroes of Canadian fiction are intellectuals who search loquaciously for their own identity or Canada's, or "superior" observers who smile condescendingly at Canadian manners, or various sorts of crusaders, pioneers and rebels who face life boldly and bring it triumphantly to heel. Gabrielle Roy knows that such exceptional people do exist, but he...

What in effect [Gabrielle Roy tells is] a fairy-tale. In a fairy tale all manner of misfortunes may befall the protagonists, but we know that they are protected by magic talismans…. Her characters are shielded from the encounter with the stalking familiar. They are treated as children not yet capable of venturing into the more sombre areas of existence. Essentially Gabrielle Roy possesses a mother's-eye view of the world. The area of action in which her characters move is limited and condition...

What Gabrielle Roy has … accomplished in La Route d'Altamont is to place together in a close rapport a young and an old person, both of whom express a deep need to communicate and to understand one another. In the four "short stories" that compose what the author has classified as a novel, the reader sees a narrator, Christine, first as an eight-year-old child in her relationships with her eighty-year-old grandmother and then with the eighty-four-year-old Monsieur Sanit-Hilaire, ...

I have stolen the title of my essay from the Dossiers de Documentation sur la Littérature Canadienne-Française…. But my working title, in bad French, was "Gabrielle Roy: Chère Maître." Gabrielle Roy has nothing in common with Henry James except mastery and a deep concern with emerging national character. Her one short-term expatriate, Pierre Cadorai of La Montagne Secrète, dies of homesickness. Casting around for helpful comparisons, I thought of Flaub...

In "Bonheur d'Occasion" poverty is not an incidental factor: it is basic to the situation of every character in the book. Poverty transcends the individual and becomes the problem of a whole district, of the whole world, when it is traced to its source, the Depression. (p. 69) The smell of poverty, the grime of poverty, the deprivation of poverty permeate the whole book and the dream of an upward ascension in society is the dream of an escape from poverty….

There are books so poignant and so intense that it is hard to believe they do not spring out of personal experience, and one's problem is not to determine the ultimate source but to decide how directly actual events in the author's life are being presented. Gabrielle Roy's latest book, Children of My Heart, is—in my view—one of these rare works. I began to read it with apprehension, since the very subject—a young teacher's relationship with the children she t...

Gabrielle Roy's novels and collections of short stories, from her celebrated first novel Bonheur d'occasion (1945), to the present [Garden in the Wind], form a coherent body of thought and system of values…. "A Tramp at the Door" is the story of a man who comes to the family's home posing as a relative from the East. His presence serves as a catalyst for the father's memories which flood to the surface. By the end of the tale the reader realizes that the stra...

At first glance a reader might think that Ces Enfants de ma vie [Children of My Heart] is a collection of short stories, and indeed Roy does present us with six nouvelles, each of which could conceivably stand on its own…. [Yet] each of the stories is a part of an organic whole, which finds its ultimate expression in the final and longest chapter. This is the story of the narrator's discreet and almost painful attachment for a fourteen-year-old pupil, Médéric. Médér...

The very heterogeneity of Canadian prairie life is well illustrated by [the four tales in Garden in the Wind], two of which deal with Doukhobor and Ukrainian immigrants, one with a Chinese immigrant, and only one with French-Canadians. The title story deals tenderly with the plight of an aged Ukrainian couple wholly lost in the modern world, forgotten by their children, barely surviving on their minuscule farm…. The poignancy of the story is great, and Roy's tasteful handling of the subtle ten...