Dictionary of Literary Biography on Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Rosanna Eleanor Mullins Leprohon wrote poems, short stories, and novels. Her most important works are "The Manor House of De Villerai" (Family Herald, 1859-1860; translated as Le Manoir de Villerai, 1861), Antoinette De Mirecourt (1864), and Armand Durand (1868), three novels based on her extensive knowledge of, and close association with, French-Canadian culture.
Leprohon was the second child of Francis and Rosanna Mullins. Francis, an Irish immigrant, became a wealthy merchant in Montreal, so his daughter had many privileges, including that of being educated at the Convent of the Congregation. In "A Touching Ceremony" (1859; collected in Poetical Works, 1881) Leprohon commemorated this "beloved Institution in which the happy days of [her] girlhood were passed" and, in the 1869 poem "On the Death of the Same Reverend Nun" (also in Poetical Works), honored the nuns who taught her there and evidently encouraged her to write. One of the first poems she published in the Literary Garland (November 1846), John Lovell's monthly periodical, described "The Young Novice" of the title, who "renounced a fleeting world, to give herself to God."
From 1846 until 1851, when the Literary Garland ceased publication, Leprohon's poems, short stories, and serialized novels appeared regularly there and received favorable notices. In 1848, for example, in Victoria Magazine, Susanna Moodie praised Leprohon's "Ida Beresford," a short novel then being serialized, as "a story written with great power and vigor" that augured for its "still very young" writer "a bright wreath of fame."
Fame, however, eluded Leprohon for another decade. After marrying Dr. Jean-Lukin Leprohon at the Parish Church of Notre Dame. Montreal. on 17 June 1851, she went to live at St. Charles on the Richelieu, where her husband had a medical practice, and within a year had the first of their thirteen children. Although both the birth and early death of this child occasioned poems, for the next few years Leprohon published little. Nevertheless, her marriage to a descendant of an old French-Canadian family and her residence at St. Charles among people whose ancestors had fought for the French during the Seven Years' War, and who themselves had witnessed events in the rebellion of 1837, proved seminal for her development as a writer.
In 1859 Leprohon, living again in Montreal, began publishing a new serialized novel, which told the story of Blanche de Villerai, the wealthy, beautiful, and virtuous heiress of "The Manor House of De Villerai," situated on the banks of the Richelieu. Engaged to Gustave de Montarville by her parents, she eventually frees Gustave so he can marry Rose Lauzon, a farmer's daughter from Villerai whom he truly loves. Although motifs such as a childhood engagement resemble aspects of Leprohon's earlier fiction, the setting of the main events of Blanche's story is New France between 1756 and 1760. Thus for the first time in her fiction Leprohon used a Canadian setting and depicted events of crucial importance in Canadian history. She depicted these events, furthermore, from the point of view of French Canadians, an angle rarely found in early English-Canadian literature.
Leprohon's second French-Canadian novel, Antoinette De Mirecourt, is set in Montreal just "after the royal standard of England had replaced the fleur-de-lys of France." Antoinette, a young French-Canadian, Roman Catholic heiress, who has come to Montreal to visit her married cousin, seems to fall in love with Major Audley Sternfield, a British officer stationed there, and secretly marries him in a Protestant ceremony. The result--much "secret sorrowing"--allows Leprohon both to moralize about the importance of young girls obeying the wise teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the reasonable wishes of parents, and to explore English-French relations in Canada.
In 1864, when John Lovell published Antoinette De Mirecourt, the renewed nationalism of French Canadians and the desire of many English Canadians to create a new nation were already bearing political and cultural fruit. Thus when Leprohon had Antoinette marry a second time, to an (albeit Roman Catholic) Englishman, Sternfield having been killed in a duel, she was quite clearly making a statement about the possibility of a new English-French culture emerging in Canada.
In her novel Armand Durand, Leprohon presented other aspects of French-Canadian society. Armand, the son of a poor, French, yet aristocratic mother and a prosperous French-Canadian farmer, leaves the country to be educated in Montreal and eventually becomes a lawyer and politician. His birth, education, and career are typical of many French Canadians. The complications in his life stem from a jealous brother and a thoughtless marriage to Délima Laurin, a frivolous woman. Only her death in childbirth frees him to marry Gertrude de Beauvoir, whom he has long loved, and to fulfill his early promise.
Leprohon continued to publish poems and short stories throughout the 1870s. Her stories are usually set in Canada, but they do not normally deal with specifically Canadian themes. Rather, they concentrate on such topics as the nature of friendship and marriage, the importance of education for women, and the worth of intelligence and morality as compared to wealth and beauty.
In 1864 five poems by Leprohon were included in the first anthology of English-Canadian poetry, Edward Hartley Dewart's Selections from Canadian Poets, and in 1867 Leprohon was described by Henry Morgan in Bibliotheca Canadensis, an early biographical dictionary, as someone who had done "more almost than any other Canadian writer to foster and promote the growth of a national Literature." In 1881, two years after her death, an edition of her Poetical Works was published. After that, although the French translations of each of her three "essentially Canadian" novels continued to be republished, Leprohon's reputation gradually diminished, and her role as a seminal writer of fiction in English dealing with French-Canadian subjects went unrecognized. Since 1970, however, the life and works of Rosanna Eleanor Mullins Leprohon have been frequently noted and increasingly praised by critics and scholars of both English-and French-Canadian literature, and new editions of her works have been published.
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