Maria Chapdelaine

Novel by Hémon, evoking the hard yet beautiful pioneering life in northern Quebec. Maria, daughter of an indefatigable settler, is in love with the adventurous fur-trader François Paradis. After his death in the wild and the death of her mother, she rejects the chance to move to the comfortable south and marries her peasant neighbour Eutrope Gagnon, remaining true to the family vocation. The novel, simply written with some use of rural Canadian speech, appeared in France in serial form and then as a book in 1916. After some resistance, it became a mythical text of ‘la survivance’ for French Canadians [see Savard]; since the 1950s its message has been regarded with more suspicion.

— Peter France