Robertine Barry, known to her public under the pseudonym Françoise, was Quebec's first woman journalist. The author of her own weekly column, she was also responsible for the first women's page in a Quebec newspaper. Barry was one of only a handful of Quebec women writers at the end of the nineteenth century, although her literary works are limited to a collection of sketches on rural life and customs, Fleurs champêtres (Rustic Flowers, 1895), and a short play, Méprise (Misunderstanding, produced in 1905). Her influence on Quebec literature, however, extended beyond her own literary production because of her support of women's education and literary culture in her columns and later in her own bimonthly paper, Le Journal de Françoise, a forerunner of the modern women's magazine.

Robertine Barry was born in L'Isle-Verte on 26 February 1863 to John Edmund Barry, who had emigrated from...