Anne Hebert Biography and List of Works

French-Canadian novelist, poet, playwright, and short-story writer, noted for her examination of the lives of the Quebeçois. Hébert combined realism and symbolism, and reworked the tradition of the historical novel. In her poems, Hébert used free verse with dense, closely packed images, achieving an almost surrealistic effect. Her novels show influence of the French nouveau roman and post-modern narrative techniques.

Anne Hébert was born in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, about 25 miles (40 kilometres) from Québec city. She started to write poetry in her teens under the tutelage of her father, Maurice-Lang Hébert (1888-1960), a provincial civil servant and a distinguished literary critic. Another crucial person in Hébert's life was her cousin, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (1912-43), a poet, who died of a heart attack at the age of 31.

Hébert attended Collège Saint-Coeur de Marie, Merici, Quebec, and Collège Notre Dame, Bellevue, Quebec. She worked for Radio Canada (1950-53), and the National Film Board of Canada (1953-54, 1959-60). In the mid-1950s she moved to Paris, but made frequent visits to Canada. Her first collection of poems, Les Songes en Éguilabre appeared in 1942, but the traditional collection did not predict the anger of Le Torrent (1950, The Torrent), a collection of short stories. In Le Tombeau des Rois (1953) Hébert explored cold-bloodedly her anguish, the stifling responsibilities of maturity, and repression and revolt, particularly in relation to a Quebec dominated and oppressed by king and clergy.

Fantastic elements were present already in Hébert's first novel, Les Chambres de bois (1958, The Silent Rooms), and continued to appear in her subsequent works. Les Chambres de bois was about a woman whose husband has a horror of sex. The heroine, Catherine, revolts against the marital prison, and breaks out of the rooms of the title. Kamouraska (1970) was based on stories Hébert's mother had told her but also on historical research. It began the cycle in the 19th-century Quebec, and was based on a historical murder, on a story of a woman who conspires with her lover to murder her husband.

Les Enfants de Sabbat (1975, Children of the Black Sabbath) was a tale of witchcraft, incest, and intercourse with the devil. Julie, the protagonist, is dedicated to sorcery and lives out a perverse version of the virgin birth. The novel was poorly received in Quebec. In Héloïse (1980) the title character belongs to a community of vampires that dwells among abandoned Parisian subway stations. Héloïse haunts the underground and sucks the blood of Métro passengers. In the story, a young couple is destroyed by vampires. In Les fous de Bassan (1982, In the Shadow of the Wind) Hébert depicted people in an English-speaking village in the Gaspé. Six narratives relate from different angles the rape and murder of two cousins, Nora and Olivia, by their cousin Stevens.

In the late1990s Hébert returned to Canada after learning she was terminally ill. She died of bone cancer on January 22, 2000, in Montreal, Quebec. Hébert never married and had no children. Her last novel, Un Habit de Lumière, appeared in 1998.

For further reading: Anne Hébert: In Search of the First Garden by Kelton W. Knight (1999); Anne Hébert, son oeuvre, leurs exils by Neil B. Bishop (1993); Anne Hébert by Janet M. Paterson (1985); La femme à la fenêtre by Maurice Émond (1984); Anne Hébert by Delbert W. Russell (1983); La quête d'équilibre dans l'oeuvre romanesque d'Anne Hébert by Serge A. Thériault (1980); Entre songe et parole by P.H. Lemieux (1978); Anne Hébert by R. Lacôte (1969); Anne Hébert by P.Pagé (1965) - For further information: Anne Hébert ; Anne Hébert (in French)

Les Songes en Éguilabre, (1942)