For many years the urban novel of French Canada has generally been set against the background of Montreal. Among the rare novels dedicated to the charm of Quebec City, Adrienne Choquette's Laure Clouet (1961) is, if not the best, certainly one of the most refined attempts to represent the nostalgia of old French-Canadian traditions. Yet this, too, is a generalization. Choquette reached past nostalgia, and while the title character of Laure Clouet seems restricted by convention (the house, the church, the river, the Plains of Abraham), this novel, like her other works, asks also that its apparent simplicities be read as illusions.

Adrienne Choquette was born to Henri Choquette, a physician, and his wife, Rose-Albertine Amyot Choquette, at Shawinigan Falls, Quebec. Orphaned at an early age, she studied at the Ursuline school in Trois-Rivières (1924-1931) before becoming a civil servant and, later, a journalist. Her first book...