A lively and perceptive letter writer, Elisabeth Bégon, as a member of the Montreal elite under the French regime, furnishes the contemporary reader with an eyewitness account of the mundane problems of eighteenth-century colonial life. As her correspondence--addressed to her son-in-law, Honoré-Michel de Villebois de la Rouvilliére--moreover reveals a private passion barely masked as maternal affection, she is also a psychologically intriguing figure appealing to the modern interest in journals and autobiographies, and a prefiguration of the mater dolorosa dominating the fictions of Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Claire Blais, and other writers from Quebec.

Born in Montreal in 1696, Marie-Elisabeth Rocbert de la Morandière married in 1718 the sub-lieutenant Claude-Michel Bégon--a man whose various adventures at sea had left him with one eye gone and his fingers mutilated--against the wishes of his brother, Quebec's intendant Michel Bégon, who considered their...