Word: jalna
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When the Atlantic Monthly held its first prize novel contest 23 years ago, a flood of 1,150 manuscripts engulfed the editorial staff; extra readers were hired to weed out the hopeless entries. Into the rejects went a manuscript titled Jalna, written by a Canadian woman named Mazo de la Roche. Its handsome binding caught the eye of one of the Atlantic's regular editors. He picked the manuscript out of the discard, glanced at it and did not stop reading until he had finished it. Jalna won the contest's $10,000 first prize...
...BUILDING OF JALNA - Mazo de la Roche- Little, Brown...
This, the ninth of the Whiteoaks novels, goes back to 1850, when Adeline ("Grand ma" of Jalna) is a bride, an unruly Irish minx whom callous readers will want to smack in earnest as her husband threatens to do in fun. Adeline and Captain Philip build their new home in Ontario, begin raising their now famous family, and otherwise provide one more variation of the story pattern familiar to thousands...
Whiteoaks (adapted by Mazo de la Roche from her novel Whiteoaks of Jalna; produced by Victor Payne-Jennings). Chief distinction of Whiteoaks is its 101-year-old heroine, played to the age limit by Ethel Barrymore. A wealthy, imperious, chops-licking war horse, Gran Whiteoak is surrounded by an obsequious tribe worrying over who will inherit her money. Neither her fuddy-duddy children nor her horsy grandchildren are prepared to see it go to Finch, the family neurotic (Stephen Haggard), and they kick up quite a rumpus when it does...
Mazo de la Roche's Jalna, novels are second-rate Forsyte Saga, gain nothing from being dramatized. As a picture of genteel rapacity, Whiteoaks does nothing in three acts it could not do better in one. Its sharpish characterizations never make up for its dragging plot. Actress Barrymore, looking like a cross between her Brother Lionel and the wolf dressed up as Red Riding Hood's grandmother, carries the whole play on her bent, centenarian back. Her expert performance gains in effect from the audience's kindly feeling that anything a 101-year-old woman says...