Les femmes de lettres canadiennes-françaises au tournant du XXe siècle par Chantal Savoie (review)

Reviews 231 inspired gem: “And Swann and the narrator are riding the waves of obsession, the outer limit of attention” (113). Her discussion of James’s thoughts on “Habit” (114– 26),“association and metaphor”(126–38),and his concept of the“fringes”that surround associations (127) are excellent examples of how her Jamesian inspired light, while not entirely novel, renews our reading of Proust through its brightness and intensity. University of Central Arkansas Phillip Bailey Savoie, Chantal. Les femmes de lettres canadiennes-françaises au tournant du XXe siècle. Québec: Nota bene, 2014. ISBN 978-2-89518-497-3. Pp. 243. $26 Can. Savoie focuses her study on a nexus of factors at the turn of the twentieth century that, as she claims, created for French-Canadian women the conditions favorable to writing. Her assertion is intriguing given that the works of the more than one hundred writers signing under a woman’s name in this period (1895–1933) were, in great part and particularly in the early years, intentionally, almost embarrassingly, modest in terms of literary ambitions: contes, causeries, saynètes, short poems, children’s literature, religious literature, moralizing literature, etc. Savoie convincingly presents the rapid move from this unpretentious writing to a more self-consciously lettered writing as a transformation within a larger system, Bourdieu-style, “qui met en relation un contexte, des individus, des pratiques, des textes, des lecteurs et des institutions”(27). Savoie proceeds methodically through four chapters. The first characterizes these femmes de lettres in three distinct generational cohorts (les aînées, les cadettes, and les benjamines), noting that the determining factors were education, marital and family status, access to the public sphere, and inclusion in networks. She observes that, especially since the older group could not train at university (this changed only in 1908), literary “training” occurred through the practice of history-writing, playwriting , the writing of women’s columns,and the like.Urbanization,greater prosperity, and a hint of feminism also contributed to resource access and self-actualization. A second chapter explores more deeply the inclusion in networks, beginning with the World Exposition in Paris (1900) and a first attempt at France-Québec connections among women,followed by the advent of a French-Canadian organization emphasizing cultural and religious (i.e., Catholic) affiliations and aimed at charitable works and education. Finally and not unrelated in this chapter, the rise of women’s columns and magazines gave women writers a readership and a platform from which to write. Savoie’s third chapter traces the legitimacy of women’s writings through these published venues to another phenomenon: criticism, though mostly in the forms of suggested reading for women and eventually critical advice for developing writers. The last chapter effects a closer analysis of two collections, the serialized Lettres de Fadette and the single volume Autour de la maison, in order to examine the successful selfpositioning of women writers both as unthreatening “novices” and as unapologetic spokeswomen for their“regional”heritage. Savoie’s study does a nice job of arguing the importance of women columnists in preparing the way for future writers of more conventional genres. Her handling of the influence of the Catholic Church on women’s literary production is also insightful, as is her discussion of the emulation in women’s columns of aspects of the French literary salon. The study is straightforward, descriptive , and persuasive, its appendices and bibliography useful for giving a sense of the scope and range of women’s writing in this crucial period in French-Canadian letters. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Scott, Corrie. De Groulx à Laferrière: un parcours de la race dans la littérature québécoise. Montréal: XYZ, 2014. ISBN 978-2-89261-820-4. Pp. 246. $30 Can. For many of us, as Americans teaching French and Francophone literature, the title of Scott’s intelligent and carefully researched book might raise questions. Surely, we might think, racial issues, usually seen in the United States in terms of black and white, cannot have been at the forefront of Quebec politics, which have been characterized by an assertion of language difference (i.e., the right to speak French) rather than...