Feeling Oneself as a Stranger in the World of ‘Belles-Lettres’: Becoming a Writer in 19th-Century Québec

Abstract

When Laure Conan, the first French-Canadian woman novelist, decided to go into writing at the end of the nineteenth century it represented a challenge to the world around her. This was a world where literary structures were embryonic and literary networks still practically non-existent. We will first explore the idea of writing as a «job». We will discover that literary activity was inevitably connected to other professions. These difficulties, of economic order, were not the only ones which women writers had to face; they also lacked the symbolic conditions which would allow them public recognition.