Quebec's first woman novelist and author of the first psychological novel in Canadian literature, Félicité Angers, who published all her works under the pseudonym Laure Conan, is a transitional figure in the history of Quebec literature. In her novel Angéline de Montbrun (1884) she moves beyond the patriotic themes typical of much nineteenth-century fiction in Quebec and takes as her center of interest--as André Brochu has shown in a 1963 article--the interior climate of her characters. Whereas writers of the terroir school later concerned themselves with the idea of the land itself, Conan attempts to explore symbolic wounds, the movements of love and loss, and the compensatory life of religious devotion in a conservative Catholic society.

Conan, the daughter of Elie and Marie Perron Angers, was born at La Malbaie, Quebec, on 9 January 1845 and studied for five years at the Ursuline convent in Quebec...