Germaine Guèvremont

Author

• Born: April 16, 1893
• Birthplace: Saint-Jerome, Quebec, Canada
• Died: August 21, 1968
• Place of death: Quebec, Canada

Biography

Germaine Guèvremont was born April 16, 1893, in Saint-Jerome, Quebec, Canada. Her father, Joseph-Jerome Gringnon, was a lawyer who enjoyed writing poetry and short stories. Her mother, Valentine Labelle Gringnon, was a painter. She grew up in a middle-class family that was artistic and inspirational.

She attended convent schools and continued her studies at Loretto Abbey in Toronto, where she excelled in English and piano. She returned to Quebec in 1912, and worked as a secretary. On May 24, 1916, she married Hyacinthe Guèvremont; the couple relocated to rural Sorel. The couple had five children: Louise, Marthe, Jean, Lucile, and Marcelle.

Guèvremont began working for Le Courier de Sorel in Quebec and served as the paper’s associate editor from 1928 to 1935. In 1935, she began work as a correspondent for the Gazette in Montreal. From 1940 to 1942, she wrote a column for L’Œil in Montreal. She became an editor for Paysana in 1942. By the early 1960’s, Guèvremont had started writing a column for Le Nouveau Journal in Montreal. By this point in her career, she had begun lecturing throughout Quebec on writing.

Guèvremont began writing poetry at an early age. Fascinated by the natural world and her environment, she signed her early poems under the pseudonym Nature, and published her first short story in 1912. She continued to write short stories and articles that were published in women’s magazines and literary journals. Following her marriage, Guèvremont took a ten-year hiatus from writing to raise her family. After the death of a daughter in 1926, the family moved to Montreal and Guèvremont sunk into a depression. Bill Nyson, her longtime friend and a fellow writer, convinced her to return to writing.

By 1942, a collection of her short stories, En Pleine Terre, was published. The stories offer an insight into everyday Sorel life through rich descriptions of landscape and a strong usage of colloquial dialogue.

In 1945 she published Le Survenant, which detailed the lives of the rural Beauchemins family, whose way of life is threatened by modernization. When a stranger enters their secluded world, the Beauchemins and the community are thrown into disarray as they must learn to cope with the intrusion of modernity. Le Survenant’s sequel, Marie-Didace, witnesses the rural community entering into the modern world, despite frustrations, limitations, and hardships. Both novels were translated into English as one book, The Outlander, and were adapted for television and radio.

Guèvremont’s writing was seen as the last of the roman de terre movement that was popular in Quebec, celebrating nature and rural French Canadian culture. Her writing is sometimes viewed as prefeminist, due to its exploration of the limitations Quebec society placed on women.

Guèvremont died August 21, 1968, in Quebec.

She received the Prix Duvernay in 1945 and the Prix Sully-Olivier de Serres and the Prix David, both in 1947, for Le Survenant. She won the medal from the Académie Canadienne-Française in 1947 for Marie-Didace, the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 1950 for The Outlander, and the Canada Council arts fellowship in 1965-1966. She was awarded an honorary D.L. degree from the University of Laval in 1952.

Guèvremont’s ability to capture, celebrate, and preserve a rural way of life that has vanished in modern society was her greatest contribution to literature.