Canada History Week 2022

LITERATURE

GABRIELLE ROY ’s literary reputation has remained constant since the publication of Bonheur d’occasion (1945), making her one of Canada’s most highly respected, widely read, and most studied authors, here and abroad. A three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award and a member of the Royal Society of Canada, her materials from 1940 to 1983 are now preserved at Library and Archives Canada. LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY has influenced people around the world through her novels, most notably Anne of Green Gables . She coped with a lonely childhood by escaping into her imagination through reading and writing. Her works and her journals describe continuity and change in Canadian life and society, the status of women, the authority of religion, the development of professions, the impact of the First World War and the Great Depression, the evolution of international publishing, and the massive shift from an agrarian world to an industrialized one. She was the subject of a Heritage Minute released in 2018. LOUIS HÉMON ’s novel Maria Chapdelaine has been translated into more than 20 languages, and by the late twentieth century had gone through nearly 150 editions, with more than 10 million copies distributed worldwide. The novel’s account of Quebec peasant life “brought Canada into world literature.” The novel has also been adapted into 3 different films.

Gabrielle Roy (Wikimedia Commons).

Louis Hémon (Université de Montréal/Division des Archives/P0109.F1.0086).

Snowdon Theatre in Montreal (Michel Bussieres/Dreamstime.com).

11