Mazo de la Roche leaped to prominence as one of the most successful writers of the twentieth century when the first novel in her Whiteoaks of Jalna series won the Atlantic Monthly Prize in 1927. The award was hailed not only as a triumph for Mazo but as marking the coming of age of Canadian literature. Therefore her popularity, which earned her a luxurious life-style that included baronial manors in the English countryside, a retinue of devoted servants, and a fondness for world travel, abated only with her death in 1961. The centre of her life was her overwhelming love for her cousin, Caroline Clement, whom she adopted as a sister and who was her life-long companion, soulmate, and muse. The core of their existence was a secret unwritten play-endlessly changing and growing-that they acted out from the moment they met almost to the end of their lives. In this insightful biography Joan Givner has recovered the hidden life of Mazo de la Roche.

Porter was the both the first lady of American letters and a woman whose indomitable will forged a life that, as biographer Joan Givner makes clear, was not only remarkable but may have been her most creative fiction of all. Born Callie Porter in the log-cabin poverty of rural Texas, she invented her own history, changing her name and ""acquiring"" a lineage of statesmen to become an aristocratic daughter of the Old South. Porter lived a life of drama and passion that spanned nine decades and witnessed some of this century's most tumultuous events. She travelled from revolutionary Mexico in the 1920s to Berlin at Hitler's rise and to Paris at the start of World War II; from Hollywood in the Forties to Washington during the Kennedy era. Somehow, by design or coincidence, she was always right in the eye of the storm when history was being made. By the end of her life, she had risen from rags to riches, anonymity to renown - all on her own terms, all on the strength of her talent, her immense stamina, and her often ruthless determination. As evocative of her era it is of the woman herself, this book is a portrait of an artist who crafted her life to appear as elegant and structured as her short stories and who, in so doing, sometimes edited out some of her own experience the hard, cold facts that until now have remained obscure.

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