SOURCE: "Black Robe: Brian Moore's Appropriation of History," in Eire-Ireland, Vol. XXV, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 40-55.

Flood is an educator and critic. In the following essay on Black Robe, she criticizes Moore for misrepresenting Canadian Indians and the French Jesuit priests who attempted to "save" them. Flood also contends that Moore's strict reliance on the Jesuits' historical first-hand accounts both prevented him from fully utilizing his skills as a novelist and betrays his "oedipal" intentions to mock the Catholic Church.

Brian Moore's fifteenth novel, Black Robe, begins with a prefatory note. In it Moore gives as the genesis of his novel his reading of Graham Greene's essay on the American historian, Francis Parkman. Greene led Moore to Parkman's The Jesuits in North America, and Parkman led him to the Jesuit Relations, on which Parkman based his history. This was not the end of Moore's preparation for writing Black...