When Marie-Claire Blais was asked which writers had influenced her work she named Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, authors who experimented boldly with forms of psychological fiction. In looking over the nine novels Mlle Blais has written up to now one can see signs of that influence in a variety of technical devices. Diaries and letters are used for psychological introspection and analysis in Tête Blanche, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel and L'Insoumise, while the stream of consciousness method is explored in the "novel-poems" and notably in The Day Is Dark, where the form appears to be markedly influenced by Virginia Woolf's The Waves. As well as being explorations of the nature of evil and its particular manifestations in Quebec society, these novels are technical experiments in conveying the inner life of the mind and especially of the adolescent mind.

It is in this context...