Madeleine Ferron, through her novels, essays, and short stories, has helped make her adopted land, the Beauce county, a lively setting of Quebec fiction. Ferron was born in Louiseville, Quebec, in Maskinongé county, the daughter of Joseph-Alphonse Ferron, a notary, and Adrienne Caron Ferron. The sister of painter Marcelle Ferron and of physician-writer Jacques Ferron, she first attended a religious school operated by the Sisters of Sainte-Anne in Lachine. At the age of twenty-two she took classes in arts at the Université de Montréal, and many years later, in the 1960s, she studied ethnography at Université Laval. In 1945 she married Robert Cliche, who was to become a judge and a well-known political figure in Quebec, and moved to the fertile, peaceful, somewhat secluded valley of the Chaudière River in Beauce. She settled in the village of Saint-Joseph, in the native land...