In 1977–78 Anne Hébert returned to drama [the genre in which she created some of her earliest work,] with the short play L'Ile de la demoiselle, which was published less than a year before her recent novel Héloise. Neither of these works is written on the scale of Kamouraska or Les Enfants, but both pick up and reshape certain themes from the earlier works, while bringing new dimensions of their own to the growing canon. Both demonstrate once again the polarity of life and death, but in new contexts and with opposite points of view: in L'Ile it is the will to live which dominates, and in Héloise it is the attraction to death which carries off the characters, with the result that the two works, when taken together, exemplify the two opposed poles.

Of the two works, Héloise is the more substantial, but L'Ile...