In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Rosanna Eleanor Mullins Leprohon wrote poems, short stories, and novels. Her most important works are "The Manor House of De Villerai" (Family Herald, 1859-1860; translated as Le Manoir de Villerai, 1861), Antoinette De Mirecourt (1864), and Armand Durand (1868), three novels based on her extensive knowledge of, and close association with, French-Canadian culture.

Leprohon was the second child of Francis and Rosanna Mullins. Francis, an Irish immigrant, became a wealthy merchant in Montreal, so his daughter had many privileges, including that of being educated at the Convent of the Congregation. In "A Touching Ceremony" (1859; collected in Poetical Works, 1881) Leprohon commemorated this "beloved Institution in which the happy days of [her] girlhood were passed" and, in the 1869 poem "On the Death of the Same Reverend Nun" (also in Poetical Works), honored the nuns who taught her there and evidently encouraged her to write. One...