Acadian writer Antonine Maillet in Paris on Nov. 15, 1979.-/Getty Images
Antonine Maillet, the diminutive former nun from small-town New Brunswick who transformed herself into a colossus of Canadian literature and became the first non-European to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, has died at the age of 95. Her publisher, Leméac, announced that she died peacefully at her home in Montreal on the morning of Feb. 17.
The author of 50 novels, plays, a children’s book and other works, Ms. Maillet is credited with having almost single-handedly given Acadia a new literary voice, one that resonated well beyond the borders of the Acadian heartland in the Maritime provinces.
Ms. Maillet’s capture of the Prix Goncourt in 1979, the only Canadian ever to have won the prize, made her a star in France, where the winning novel, Pélagie-la-Charrette, sold one million copies, and she became a favourite of France’s literary talk shows.
“I have avenged my ancestors,” Ms. Maillet said of the prize, a reference to the “Great Upheaval” of 1755 when British authorities deported the Acadian population, for failing to sign an oath of obedience to the Crown, dispersing them to the American colonies and beyond. Written in the Acadian French vernacular, the novel tells the story of Pélagie, a combative Acadian woman who makes the long and eventful journey back north to Acadia from Georgia on an ox-cart (the charrette in the title), a voyage that takes her and her fellow Acadians 10 years to accomplish.
In 2021, Ms. Maillet was made a Commander of France’s Legion of Honour by French President Emmanuel Macron at a special ceremony at the Elysée Palace in Paris. “I feel uplifted,” she cracked, a joking reference to her stature of less than five feet.
Ms. Maillet is probably best known in Canada for La Sagouine, a one-woman play featuring a plain-talking Acadian cleaning woman, one-time prostitute and fisherman’s wife that premiered in 1971.
The play was performed more than 3,000 times over the next four decades in both French and English by actress Viola Léger, who came to embody the fictional character and her musings on the meaning of life. In a 2010 review of a Toronto revival, The Globe and Mail’s Martin Morrow called the play “a thing of rugged, aching beauty” that was “considered a landmark in bringing Canada’s disenfranchised Acadian community to the stage.”
Wayne Grady, who translated La Sagouine into English and won a Governor-General’s Award for his translation of Ms. Maillet’s On the Eighth Day, said that Pélagie-la-Charrette was to Acadia what Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was to Latin America.
“Maillet wrote the history of her people incorporating the mythological elements of that history directly into the text, just as Marquez did for Colombia,” Mr. Grady told The Globe and Mail. He said translating Ms. Maillet’s work was very challenging because the Acadian vocabulary hadn’t changed much from French of the 14th century and initially there was only a single dictionary of Acadian French available.
Antonine Maillet was born on May 10, 1929, in the village of Bouctouche, N.B., the eighth of nine children of Leonide Maillet and Virginie Cormier, who were both school teachers. (A tenth child died early in life.) The Depression forced her father to leave teaching and take a job managing the local general store, which was owned by businessman K.C. Irving, who later emerged as the province’s dominant industrialist.
From a young age, young Antonine became aware of the linguistic and economic cleavages in the village, she later recalled. Her father spoke French with his customers but had to write all his manager’s reports in English.
From her early years, Antonine’s parents instilled in her a deep sense of their roots as early European settlers of North America and above all, as a small people that been marginalized over the years. When Antonine asked her mother who she was, she responded, “Acadian, which means that you belong to a superior people.” Her mother died of cancer when Antonine was 14. Her father died from Parkinson’s disease 10 years later.
Antonine, known familiarly as Tonine, was sent off to Catholic boarding school and then studied at Collège Notre Dame de l’Acadie, earning a BA, and at St. Joseph University, a forerunner of the University of Moncton, where she received an MA. Antonine became a nun at age 21, like three of her sisters, calling herself Soeur Marie-Grégoire for the next 15 years. She taught school, first in the village of Richibucto and then later at her alma mater, Notre Dame College.
She was drawn to literature from an early age. “I hardly knew how to write when I began scribbling little stories and poems,” she recalled.
Her first play, Entracte, was performed in 1957, and her first novel, Pointe-aux-Coques, the tale of a young teacher in a poor Acadian fishing village, was published in 1958.
Recognition came quickly. Her work Les Jeunes Enfants Sont Faits, performed in Vancouver in 1960, won a Canada Council Prize for best Canadian play. She moved to Montreal and returned to university where she earned a BA (licence ès arts) in French literature at the University of Montreal and began work on an MA.
But her thesis was rejected by the jury. “This first academic failure was very hard but on reflection, I can say that the jury was right,” she said in an interview with the university’s alumni magazine in 2019. Ms. Maillet transferred to Laval University, where she earned her PhD in 1970. Her thesis was on Acadian folk traditions.
In 1967, she abandoned her life as a nun. “I didn’t have the conviction that was needed to make a vow of obedience, of poverty and of chastity,” she said later.
She left teaching in 1975 to concentrate on her writing full-time but she later served as a visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley and at the State University of New York in Albany. She also worked for a time at Radio-Canada in Moncton.
Despite the growing attention to her work in the francophone world, including a successful tour of France for a production of La Sagouine in 1975, Ms. Maillet’s path to the Prix Goncourt was not easy.
Her novel Les Cordes de Bois was a finalist for the award in 1977. The selection jury tied 5 to 5 between Ms. Maillet and a rival French author. But as chair of the jury, novelist Hervé Bazin had two votes, and opted in favour of the Frenchman, complaining that Ms. Maillet’s book was hard to understand because it included passages in archaic Acadian French.
And even when Ms. Maillet finally won the prize two years later, she got the cold shoulder from much of Quebec’s literary community, who had hoped that one of their own would win the prize. It was a time of tense relations between separatists and federalists in Quebec and Ms. Maillet, although she lived in Montreal, wasn’t considered a true Québécoise.
That’s despite the fact that she had moved to Montreal in 1970 and bought a home in the bourgeois neighbourhood of Outremont, where the street was renamed in her honour after her Goncourt win. She lived in the same home for 40 years.
In a 2009 National Film Board documentary on her life, Ms. Maillet recalled that she got piles of congratulatory letters when she won the Goncourt but only one or two from her literary colleagues in Quebec. Instead, her success was greeted with “nasty” articles in the Quebec press.
Perhaps the most vicious reaction came from Quebec novelist Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, who wrote in Le Devoir that Quebec literature had been turned into a “barnyard” where writers from “arriviste Acadia” had the nerve to “arrogantly collect all the marbles,” an apparent reference to Ms. Maillet’s literary awards.
Ms. Maillet would return to Bouctouche every summer but Montreal was her home. “Montreal is the metropolis of francophones in America. It’s the metropolis of French Canada. So I feel at home here because I am at the centre of French Canada,” she said in 1997.
And Ms. Maillet saw a mission in her writing. “I really am aware of something that is beyond me, above me or under my feet that is broader than myself and my people,” she told The Fifth Estate in 1980. “I am some expression of a people that has not been able to express itself for 300 years.”
Ms. Maillet spent much of her adult life in a relationship with Mercedes Palomino, a Spanish-born journalist and actress, who co-founded Montreal’s Théâtre du Rideau Vert.
“She was the love of my life,” Ms. Maillet told Radio-Canada in 2022 in a rare discussion of her private life. Ms. Palomino, who was 16 years older than Ms. Maillet, died in 2006 at age 93.
Ms. Maillet was honoured with 31 honorary doctorates. She was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1976 and promoted to companion in 1981. She was named an officer of the National Order of Quebec in 1990 and was inducted into the Order of New Brunswick in 2005 and also received several honours from the French government.
She was the recipient of 15 literary awards, including the Governor-General’s Award, the Prix France-Canada and the Prix des Quatre Jurys.
Ms. Maillet served as chancellor of the University of Moncton from 1989 to 2000 and in 2023 emerged as a leading voice urging a name change for the university. She saw it as a rejection of General Robert Monckton, who was linked with the deportation of the Acadians in 1755. But after a study, the university’s board rejected the idea as too costly and insisted that the university had been named after its geographic location, rather than the historical figure.
Canada Post unveiled a stamp in her honour in November, 2024, as part of a series celebrating French Canadian authors in a ceremony at Montreal’s Salon du Livre.
Ms. Maillet had schools named after her, and a theme park was established in her hometown of Bouctouche in 1991 for her most famous literary creation. Le Pays de la Sagouine attracts thousands of tourists every summer to a reconstructed Acadian village that features theatre, music and dance.
Ms. Maillet’s siblings all died before her but she leaves many nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and grand-nephews.
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