Wanda Campbell - Hidden Rooms - Confederation Poets

Rosanna (Mullins) Leprohon was born in Montreal on January 12, 1829, the daughter of a wealthy businessman and was educated at the convent of the Congregation of Notre-Dame. Beginning when she was seventeen, her poetry and prose began to appear in the Literary Garland and other periodicals including the True Witness, the Journal of Education, and the New Dominion Monthly. In 1848, Susanna Moodie drew attention to the young writer as “one of the gifted, upon whom fancy smiled in her cradle and genius marked her for his own. As a Canadian born, we augur for her a bright wreath of fame” (Victoria Magazine [June 1848]:240). In 1851, she married the French Canadian doctor Jean-Lucien Leprohon and, over the next twenty years, bore thirteen children. Not surprisingly, her literary output declined during this period though she continued to publish poetry in Montreal periodicals and write the historical novels for which she is most remembered.

In 1864, Edward Hartley Dewart included five of her poems in his Selections from Canadian Poets. “Her poetry,” he writes, “is marked by simplicity and gracefulness of style, strong domestic and human sympathies and high moral sentiments” (58). He also notes that her poems have never been collected, and encourages her to “present them in a form suitable for permanent preservation” (58). Dewart’s suggestion was acted upon in 1881, two years after Leprohon’s death, when The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon was published in Montreal with an Introduction attributed to John Reade, the literary editor of the Montreal Gazette. The 222 page volume includes 110 poems divided into five categories: “Sacred Poems,” “Narrative and Descriptive Poems,” “Reflective and Elegiac Poems,” “Vers de Societé," and “Voices of the Hearth.” One contemporary review in Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly indicates that “there is not a little in the volume which, from a literary point of view, had better have been left out” (325) an assessment with which is it is difficult not to concur. [Page 33]

In 1972, J.C. Stockdale wrote that Leprohon’s poetry is touched with “moral seriousness and didacticism” (537). He cites the influence of Thomas Gray and picks “A Canadian Snowfall” as her best poem, comparing it to a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem on the same theme. His discussion of the Romanticism of her depictions of scenery and seasons concludes: “her poetry is good technically, and, in places, interesting in theme and content, but it must take second place to her novels of life in early Quebec” (537). It was primarily Leprohon’s fiction that prompted Henry Morgan to write in 1867: “She has done more almost than any other Can. writer to foster and promote the growth of a national Literature” (224). In her Preface to Antoinette de Mirecourt (1864) Leprohon wrote: “Canadians should not be discouraged from endeavouring to form and foster a literature of their own…the smallest stone employed always helps a little in the construction of even the loftiest building” (17). In his Introduction to a 1973 reprint of that novel, Carl F. Klinck writes that Leprohon’s book of poetry

In her sympathetic overview of Leprohon’s fiction, Carole Gerson argues that she shares the fate of her contemporaries James DeMille and Agnes Maule Machar in that “a combination of choice and chance shaped their literary fortunes, destining them to support their country’s conservative cultural values and to refrain from challenging the limits of their own talents” (217).

Though dismissed by R.G. Moyles as “generally poor stuff” that “deserves little critical attention” (157), Leprohon’s poetry still speaks to the power of the Canadian landscape, particularly in winter. Even when that landscape is foreboding, as in “Autumn Evening at Murray Bay,” the image of “restless waters ’gainst a bleak and rock-bound shore” lingers in the mind of the poet and her readers long after “pleasant tapers” and glad voices lure her back into a domestic interior.

Leprohon’s efforts to infuse the Canadian scene with mythical significance are revealed in her portrayals of French Canadian and Native history. A central theme of poems about the lives of white and Native women is the contrast between the “bright unfettered” hours of girlhood, when young women are still “heart-free” and “unwon,” and the adult world of pain and [Page 34] responsibility. The “strange Promethean spark” of Joan of Arc and other virginal heroines stands in stark contrast to the “cunning and art” cultivated by Edith, the shallow social climber of “A Modern Courtship.” Elsewhere, Leprohon celebrates the benefits of the marital and maternal state but acknowledges that to love is to open oneself to loss.

Selected Bibliography

The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Montreal: Lovell, 1881)

Susanna Moodie, “Editor’s Table,” Victoria Magazine 1 (June 1848): 240; E.H. Dewart, ed. Selections from Canadian Poets (Montreal, Lovell: 1864) 58; Henry Morgan, Bibliotheca Canadensis (Ottawa: G.E. Desbarats, 1867) 224. Anonymous, “The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon,” Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly 8 (1882): 324-25; Henri Deneau, “Life and Works of Mrs. Leprohon, nee R.E. Mullins” (unpub. MA thesis, U of Montreal, 1948); J.C. Stockdale, “Mullins, Rosanna Eleanor,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography 10 (1972): 536-38; Carl F. Klinck, “Introduction,” Antoinette de Mirecourt (1864, rpt. 1973): 5-14; R.G. Moyles, English-Canadian Literature to 1900 (Detroit: Gale, 1976): 157-58; Carole Gerson, “Three Writers of Victorian Canada,” Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series 1:195-256 (Toronto: ECW, 1983); Mary Jane Edwards, “Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon,” Dictionary of Literary Biography 99 (1990): 206-208; Lorraine McMullen and Elizabeth Waterston, “Rosanna Mullins Leprohon: At Home in Many Worlds,” Silenced Sextet: Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Novelists (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 1992): 14-51. [Page 35]