First published in 1935,Young Renny takes us even further back in the Whiteoak family saga to 1906. Renny, the young master of Jalna, is just eighteen. His twenty-year-old sister Meg is engaged to marry the young man next door, Maurice Vaughan Uncle Nick and Uncle Ernest, now in their fifties, have squandered their inheritances abroad on high living and reside again at Jalna. But the plot thickens further, when two outsiders join the mix: A gypsy woman, who seduces Renny, and a distant cousin from Ireland, who befriends Gran, moves into Jalna, and spies on the family. This is book 4 of 16 inThe Whiteoak Chronicles. It is followed by Whiteoak Heritage.

In 1927, Mazo de la Roche was an impoverished writer in Toronto when she won a $10,000 prize from the American magazine Atlantic Monthly for her novelJalna. The book became a bestseller and was adapted for stage, screen and television.