One of Canada's major twentieth-century writers, Anne Hébert has followed a markedly original path in her work. The author of two of the masterpieces of modern Canadian writing, the cycle of poems entitled Le Tombeau des rois (first published in 1953; translated into English, 1967) and the novel Kamouraska (1970; translated, 1973), Hébert has perhaps more than any other modern Quebec writer analyzed the profound impact of the Jansenist cosmology upon a cross section of human types representing its most thoroughly bound victims. Through her exploration of the classic themes of guilt, evil, violence, exile, and the anguish of isolation, she has created a fully unified oeuvre which is both brilliantly executed and profound in its understanding of the psychology of pain and entrapment.

Anne Hébert was born in Saint-Catherine de Fossambault, a village near Quebec City, on 1 August 1916. Raised in a literary household, Hé...