Woonsocket

Taking its title from the initial book of the series, The Woonsocket Trilogy begins in 1928 in the steep, river-hugging mill town of Woonsocket Rhode Island where French-Canadian Catholics predominate. A young author, Gabrielle d’Avignon, is the first member of her family to experience the Church’s censure when the Québec clergy bans her début novel. Next Gabrielle’s father Edouard, in his zealous campaign to save French schools, defies his local bishop who threatens to excommunicate him. Edouard’s campaign takes him to Rome to appeal to the pope. But Edouard’s ultimate battle will be the one that pits him against his own daughter Gabrielle.

The second volume of the trilogy, The Anemones, is a prequel that tells the earlier WWI story of Louis Breton, the defrocked tramp printer from Woonsocket and his doomed love affair. Nuta, the third installment, goes back a further twenty years to uncover the mystery of the heroine’s father who is suspected of having “gone native” in abandoning his privileged life to live with the Innu.

The first chapter of my novel

Woonsocket

is featured in

Résonance

https://www.resonance-journal.org/

Annick de Bellefeuille

Author of Historical Fiction

Woonsocket is the first novel of the Woonsocket Trilogy. The story is rooted in the exodus of my people from their homeland in Québec to the mills of New England. From the industrial revolution of the 1840’s to the 1930’s, a million French Canadians left their impoverished villages to operate the looms of the North East’s prodigious textile industry. For decades, this history was suppressed in Québec, and little known to Americans. As a Québécoise who immigrated to the U.S., I feel compelled to rescue this North American chapter from oblivion.