Antonine Maillet, a Canadian writer who shaped a new literary language for an isolated French-speaking minority, becoming the first non-European to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, died on Feb. 17 at her home in Montreal, on a street named after her. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by her publisher, Leméac.
In novels, short stories and plays, Ms. Maillet gave voice to the overlooked French-speaking populations in the historic region of Acadia — perhaps half a million people spread across the Anglophone Maritime Provinces of Canada.
Their ancestors had been expelled by English overlords in 1755, in what Acadians call “le Grand Dérangement,” or the Great Displacement. Ms. Maillet was determined to call attention to that historical injustice, and to establish the independence and vitality of Acadian culture in the present.
“We Acadians, we were considered inferior beings,” she told the French newspaper Le Monde in 1979 after winning the Prix Goncourt for her novel “Pélagie-la-Charrette,” which tells the story of a tough 18th-century Acadian woman, Pélagie, bent on returning to her homeland in an ox-driven cart up the East Coast of revolutionary America. An English translation was published in 1982 as “Pélagie.” (The literal translation of the title is “Pélagie the ox cart.”)
“I was perfectly aware that if I wanted to succeed in life, I had to become English-speaking, because the Acadian was looked down on for what he was,” she told Le Monde.
Instead, she celebrated the language she had grown up with; she refused as early as the age of 12 to write a school paper in English, as her teacher insisted.
Ms. Maillet did more than simply speak up for Acadians. She created a new language out of the archaic French that had survived through an almost exclusively oral tradition in her native Acadia. “I speak for those who couldn’t, because they didn’t know how to write,” she once told an interviewer for Radio-Canada.
In doing so, she beguiled France’s literary arbiters, who were confronted with a language that had not been spoken in their own country in 300 years.
“She invented Acadia, gave their laurels to a people that had been forgotten and whose survival was due only to incredible obstinacy,” the critic Gerard Meudal wrote in Le Monde in 1997. “She made their voices heard.”
Her career was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. A theme park animated by principal characters from her works, including Pélagie and La Sagouine, the tough-talking Acadian washerwoman who was the title character of a theatrical monologue by Ms. Maillet that was a hit in 1971, was built in 1992 in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Ms. Maillet’s hometown. A Canada Post stamp with her image was issued in 2021. President Emmanuel Macron of France awarded her the Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest civilian honor, the same year, and he visited her at her home in Montreal last year.
“She gave back to the French language a note that was no longer being heard, the French of Rabelais,” the 16th-century writer on whom she had written her doctoral dissertation, her longtime editor at Leméac, Pierre Filion, said in an interview. “And cultivated French people appreciated it.”
“Pélagie-la-Charrette,” one of her few works to be translated into English, crackles and snaps with the earthy rhythms of rough-hewed peasant French. The idiom is deliberately unrefined, yet it does not come across as stagy.
She “virtually created a new literary language to convey the grit and flow of present-day Acadian,” the Canadian writer Mark Abley wrote in The Times Literary Supplement in 1982. “‘Pélagie-la-Charrette’ takes this artificial vernacular back to its youth.”
Ms. Maillet’s words, he added, “can be fresh and harsh as ice.”
But “Pélagie” is much more than an interesting experiment in language. It is Ms. Maillet’s homage to an imagined ancestor of superhuman grit and determination.
Early in the novel, she plants her hero’s flag: “‘Not me!’ Pélagie yelled, seeing the ones who had been deported drop like flies, all up and down the coast of Georgia. ‘I’m not going to leave any of my own behind in a stranger’s land.’ ’’
Later, exasperated with a straggler she wants to take back to Acadia with her, she explodes: “Suddenly, without even thinking about it, waving her arm about such that the sky is probably still vibrating: ‘Get in!’ says she. ‘Let’s get on back to the country!’’’
The carriage, Ms. Maillet explains, “was her fiefdom, and she had the right to let anybody get in that she wanted.”
This is a character who will not be defeated.
“A woman, she’s chosen to express, through women, the history of a people who were burned alive, beaten, broken, yet perpetually reborn,” the critic Jacques Cellard of Le Monde wrote after the book was published in France in 1979.
The character of Pélagie assumed an independent existence of her own, as Henry Giniger, a New York Times correspondent, wrote after he visited Ms. Maillet in 1979: “A new Canadian heroine, Pélagie‐la‐Charrette, has emerged as a symbol and champion of the French‐speaking minority’s determination to survive on an English‐speaking continent.”
A diminutive figure with a ready laugh, Ms. Maillet appeared to her interviewers much as her principal characters did: tough and determined.
Her success was often resented in the cultural center of Francophone Canada, Quebec, as The Globe and Mail recently recalled: “Perhaps the most vicious reaction came from Quebec novelist Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, who wrote in the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir that Quebec literature had been turned into a ‘barnyard’ where writers from ‘arriviste Acadia’ had the nerve to ‘arrogantly collect all the marbles,’ an apparent reference to Ms. Maillet’s literary awards.”
Another woman created by Ms. Maillet, La Sagouine, was an even bigger hit: The one-woman show of the same name was performed more than 2,000 times over 50 years in Canada, principally by the Canadian actress Viola Léger. The character’s “lively and lucid words,” Le Devoir wrote last week, are “full of humor but also of frank anger faced with innumerable injustices,” reflecting “a poeticized country language, where archaic words and sonorities crash up against each other.”
Marie Antonine Maillet was born on May 10, 1929, in Bouctouche, one of 10 children of Leonide Maillet and Virginie (Cormier) Maillet. Both her parents were schoolteachers.
She attended a Catholic boarding school, Collège Notre-Dame d’Acadie, in Memramcook, and received her baccalauréat (the equivalent of a high school diploma) there in 1950. She went on to attend the University of Moncton, from which she received a B.A., followed by an M.A. in 1959.
Ms. Maillet published her first novel, “Pointe-aux-Coques,” in 1958 and her second, “On a Mangé la Dune,” in 1962. She taught literature in the 1960s and early ’70s at the Universities of Moncton, Laval and Montreal, and earned her Ph.D. at Laval in 1971.
By the mid-1970s, her literary success, notably with “La Sagouine” and “Mariaagélas,” a 1973 novel that tells the story of a pirate-like woman during Prohibition, had allowed her to largely quit teaching.
For many years, she lived with the theater director Mercedes Palomino, who died in 2006. She leaves no immediate survivors.
“I never had children, but at the same time I had so many children,” she told Le Devoir two years ago. “All of Acadia.”
As she told Le Monde in 1979: “We are a minority, even on our home turf. Which is even harder than being in a minority abroad. And this is what I want to say: All those who are, in this world, a little bit mistreated, looked-down on, in the minority — we understand them.”
