Although the historical Quebec setting seems to have appealed equally to male and female writers, both of whom drew upon Gothic modes, there is an observable difference: the novels by men that rose to prominence—like William Kirby's (1877), Gilbert Parker's (1896), and John Lespérance's (1876)—invested heavily in documented events and historical figures, providing a fictional behind-the-scenes look at the personal intrigue and military engagements in the fall of New France. These authors were praised by reviewers for the pedagogical value of their works, and Parker's became a standard high school text (Rothenburger 91). Women writers also recreated pre- and post-Conquest Quebec, but their narratives tended to place more emphasis on courtship and family drama than on battlefield incident. Although Rosanna Leprohon's novel (1860), set in final years of New France, traces both the romantic choices of the heroine and the battlefield efforts of her suitor, the emphasis falls on the former, and Leprohon followed this novel with her better-known work, (1864), set immediately post-Conquest, in which the battlefield has moved decidedly into the drawing room. These works of domestic romance nonetheless represent, with equal emphasis to the works by male authors, the politics of English–French conflict that lie at the heart of Canada's national self-formation. Without the glorified textbook incident so prominent in the fiction of their male counterparts, however, the works by women have not garnered equivalent recognition. But a renewed scholarly interest in these works, especially in the light of Gothic analysis, reveals their importance in articulating some of literary Canada's most pressing concerns of the nineteenth century: the country's relationship with its European mother countries, the vexed relationship between English and French Canada, and the importance of the country's shared understanding of (and imaginative involvement in) how its history informs its present. Manifest in these works is a Gothic exploration of the divided self, which unfolds, in uniquely Canadian fashion, amidst the complexities of the country's French and English colonial legacies.

While the fall of New France afforded a setting primed for the dramatic intrigue typical of Gothic romance, the othering one would expect from English writers depicting French society is consistently muted or doubled—at least in women's writing—with a strong sense of sympathy and identification that belies any simple project of romantic exoticism. One discovers in this fiction that English-Canadian women writers felt a deep sense of identification with French Canada, despite the apparent contradiction of this English–French positioning. Indeed, by placing their fictions in the context of New France under British attack, these writers could explore subjectivities vulnerable to complex forms of political as well as personal victimization. And in narratives that cast English Canada and its British forbears as the oppressive force, there is a discernible strain of criticism whereby these works implicitly question and critique the historical foundations and perhaps by extension the present-day establishment of the dominant English culture.

This analysis centres on four texts: Frances Brooke's (1769), commonly referred to as Canada's first novel; Julia Catherine Beckwith's (1824), considered to be the first novel by a Canadian-born writer; Rosanna Leprohon's (1864), written just prior to Confederation ; and May Agnes Fleming's (1876), a lesser known popular romance set on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Together, these writers represent some of the early and important efforts in creating a Canadian literature that would explore specifically Canadian themes. They were also writers who were aware of a literary marketplace in which they sought material success, and from the late eighteenth century on, Gothic romance had proven itself in this area, particularly for women writers. Apart from being marketable, though, Gothic modes lend themselves to the expression of otherwise suppressed feelings of alienation, ambivalence, and trauma. These writers adapted the Gothic to the complexities of their literary nationalism, and it is this version of Canadian Gothic that I wish to explore.

Explanations of English Canada's interest in Quebec as a literary setting underscore the nineteenth-century desire to foster an English-language literature that would contribute to Canada's cultural self-definition. Konrad Gross explains that English-Canadians, searching for an all-Canadian identity, eagerly turned to Old Quebec whose history they now viewed not only with the curiosity of outsiders, but also probed for materials with which they could identify (73). Carole Gerson also highlights English Canada's desire to manage its own identity in close relation to French Canada: Over the course of the nineteenth century, fascination with the otherness of French Canada muted into a sense of identification with Quebecois and Acadian culture, folklore, and history which helped enrich English Canada's own relatively barren national image (110). Grounded in the context of pre- Confederation anxieties about Canada's dubious cultural distinctiveness, these explanations make sense of English Canada's desire to celebrate, even to construct, a rich cultural heritage that could provide the foundation for a unique national literature. Nonetheless, by classifying these romances of Old Quebec as symptoms of national self-doubt, these explanations perhaps overlook some of the creative possibilities in the writing and reading of this body of literature. Misao Dean confirms that critical opinion has not favoured these works, noting that although romances like and dominated the literary scene in Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they are generally dismissed by contemporary Canadian critics as examples of an inferior literary form not worthy of sustained critical attention (44). She further explains that this is especially evident in the case of . Speaking of Leprohon's series of Quebec novels, John Stockdale in the says of , This is a romantic, stilted novel, the worst of the later group, and of Leprohon's body of work, he writes, it is obviously the outpouring of a romantic fancy fed on the novels of her time (n. pag.) Stockdale's assessment reflects the dismissive attitude toward romance that has worked to the detriment of Canada's nineteenth-century fiction of national romance in general, and women's offerings within that tradition in particular.

The place of women's writing in the development of Canada's Gothic literature is also a matter of some debate. Studies of nineteenth-century Canadian Gothic have tended to agree with Coral Ann Howells that the first Canadian Gothic was wilderness Gothic (106) and that the English-Canadian Gothic tradition begins in the mid-nineteenth century with Canadian-born John Richardson's nightmarish historical romance, (1832) and Susanna Moodie's non-fictional immigrant memoir (1852) (105). Justin D. Edwards also posits as arguably Canada's first Gothic novel (2), and Margot Northey's treatment of the novel in her book underscores the centrality of wilderness in these explanations of Canadian Gothic. , then, perhaps more than any other text, has influenced the emergence and articulation of a Canadian Gothic tradition, as well as the direction and definition of this debated body of literature. But has the emphasis on and wilderness Gothic obscured other dimensions of Canadian Gothic? Works that share the wilderness Gothic theme, such as , are easily incorporated into the tradition presided over by , but other texts to receive sustained critical attention are relatively few. Northey treats Kirby's at length as decorative Gothic, and Kirby's work is often paired with Parker's . Gerry Turcotte joins Edwards in devoting in-depth attention to James De Mille's . Apart from Moodie, though, few women writers have received extended critical attention in the context of nineteenth-century Canadian Gothic. And this is perhaps explained in part by the differences between the wilderness Gothic of that has defined the genre and the conventions of domestic romance that shape the Gothicism of English Canada's women writers. Turning their attention not to the wilderness but instead to a French Canada both civilized and sophisticated in its social arrangements, these novels turn to Gothic modes—evident in narrative moments of ambivalence, anxiety, excess, and the uncanny—to explore and imagine a Canada felt to be both familiar and foreign, intensely sympathetic, yet habitually estranged. I would like to bring the insights of Gothic analysis to bear on some of English Canada's nineteenth-century women writers, and I would like in turn to place their works within the critical development of Canadian Gothic itself, a body of literature perhaps more various than has yet been observed.

The launching of a national literature was clearly on the minds of English Canada's nineteenth-century writers. In her Preface to , Leprohon claims for her novel one key merit: that of being essentially Canadian (viii). But the production of a national literature, as Jonathan Kertzer argues, though it might seem self-evident in its aim to advance a sense of national cohesion, is paradoxically inclined to express the inner conflict that plagues such attempts: If literature promotes social cohesion by imagining a nation, it also encourages social discontent. A common language inflected by a national voice is supposed to articulate the national life, but that very articulation can prove divisive, especially when the voice speaks in a colonial accent. Literature knits people together, but it also shows how the knitting was accomplished and at what cost. Language knits but also unravels (13). English-Canadian writers who sought to imagine a nation through narratives of historical Quebec were undoubtedly prone to speak in such a colonial accent, and the intricacies of that colonial positioning, with its uneasy elaborations of exotic otherness coupled with eager identification, are revealed in this writing through restless Gothic narratives that at once awaken and seek to subdue the traumatic legacies in Canada's national story.

Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte suggest that Gothic fictions emerging from colonial contexts often emphasize the continuing legacy of colonial history in settler-invader cultures (ix) and that such narratives may express resentment towards flawed or complicit ancestors as well as explorations of hybrid cultural forms, and interrogations of national belonging and citizenship (ix). Canada's nineteenth-century women writers have seldom been considered together in light of their use of Gothic modes, and yet the themes identified by Sugars and Turcotte are readily identifiable in their works: Quebec-born Adelaide de St. Louis, of , is alerted to her own hybrid cultural form when she discovers that she was switched in her infancy with another child, making her as much a member of the British aristocracy as she is a devoted child of French Canada. And resentment towards flawed or complicit ancestors may be embodied in both and in dastardly British seducers who jeopardize the integrity and self-development of the Canadian heroines. Indeed, these two works direct a strong critique against representatives of the British in Canada; for these writers, the imaginative adoption of an embattled French-Canadian identity may have allowed them not only to deepen the gender politics of their narratives but also to express their ambivalence about the British legacy in their own culture, articulating a conflict at the very heart of the country they sought to inaugurate as a literary subject.

Frances Brooke's takes place on the heels of the British conquest in the period that would become the foundational context for writers of the nineteenth century. But where later writers would seek to weave French and English Canada together in the creation of a shared national story, Brooke spoke in a more decidedly imperial voice, and her depiction of French Canada is shaped by a firm belief in British supremacy. Cecily Devereux points out this fundamental dichotomy in Brooke's novel, which, she explains, is engaged in the representation and affirmation of British supremacy offshore with regard to the determined construction and repression of a French other (460). Thus, Emily Montague's perfections are carefully set off by comparison with French-Canadian women who are said to lack the sensibility so essential, and British, a part of Emily's attractions: as Ed Rivers, Emily's admirer, writes, they are gay, coquet, and sprightly; more gallant than sensible; more flatter'd by the vanity of inspiring passion, than capable of feeling it themselves;…The very reverse is in general true of the English (13). But the comfortable imperial self-satisfaction of Brooke's characters, and of the narrative itself, is destabilized by the one French-Canadian character developed in any depth: Madame Des Roches.

Though she authors none of the letters contained in , Madame Des Roches has drawn much critical attention, for the energies she releases in the text are perhaps never fully contained. Dermot McCarthy sees Madame Des Roches as a complex figure of alterity, whose sexual identity as a woman and a widow…empowers her with a subversive energy that Brooke barely manages to control (n. pag.). Far from introducing a feminist agenda into the novel, Madame Des Roches, argues McCarthy, reveals Brooke's racist, patriarchal, and patronizing treatment of French-Canadian and Indian women. Rejected and peripheralized by Brooke's protagonists and the narrative itself, Madame Des Roches nonetheless eludes the total control of the author and expresses instead deep-seated colonial ambivalence in the management of boundaries between colonizer and colonized, revealing the instability of the self/Other binary (McCarthy).

Unlike the protagonists, who are all visitors to Canada, Madame Des Roches is a landowner whose very name bears out her connection to the natural Canadian environment. When Rivers first visits her estate in the Kamaraskas, he describes it as the wildest country on earth; for several leagues almost a continual forest, with only a few straggling houses on the river side (80–81). The distance from more populous society disturbs Rivers, who remarks on the absolute solitude of [Madame Des Roches's] situation (81), isolation he regards as the most cruel punishment human nature could support (82). Rivers thus admits an acute vulnerability to the anxieties that arise in Madame Des Roches's remote habitation. Amidst the novel's otherwise socially sophisticated milieu, Rivers's expedition to the Kamaraskas estate may be read as a momentary eruption of wilderness Gothic, intriguingly penned well prior to Richardson's invention of the genre. As though building upon this theme, Madame Des Roches takes him to visit a hermit, whose tale of love lost to Canada's hostile elements confirms the sense of threat and betrayal to be found in the Canadian wilds. This warning of the Gothic doom that waits on forbidden desires is quickly followed by the discovery of Madame Des Roches's deep but unrequited love for Rivers, which becomes a source of intense anxiety to that paragon of British sensibility, Emily Montague.

explores the various nature of love through its major pairings: comparing herself with Emily, Arabella explains that they differ in our ideas of love: it is the business of her life, the amusement of mine; 'tis the food of her hours, the seasoning of mine (210). Arabella and Emily both choose partners whose styles of love match their own, while Rivers's sister Lucy, who resembles her brother in sensibility, makes an unlikely match with long-time rake, John Temple. These unions, though various, nonetheless establish two major brands of love: the deep and constant love based upon sensibility (itself considered a British attribute), and the lively flirtatious love of the rake/coquet—both variations, in the right circumstances, forming the basis of happy marriages. Amidst these examples of love's various, and ultimately harmonious, guises, the feelings of Madame Des Roches strike a discordant note. For, rather than accommodating itself to the terms set out, her love defies the usual categories: though French, she is not given to playful flirtation; nor does her passion for Rivers resemble the ideal of sensibility embodied in Emily; rather, her unruly desires repeatedly prove unmanageable, inexplicable, and ultimately incompatible with matrimony. There is a degree of excess in her emotional life not matched by the other characters, which lends a Gothic texture to her characterization. In Gothic productions, argues Fred Botting, imagination and emotional effects exceed reason. Passion, excitement and sensation transgress social proprieties and moral laws. Ambivalence and uncertainty obscure single meaning (2). In a confession to Emily, Madame Des Roches reveals how her reason was overcome by the strength of her feelings, impelling her to leave the Kamaraskas for Quebec, despite her knowledge of Rivers's devotion to Emily: she said, her coming was an imprudence which only love could excuse; and that she had no motive for her journey but the desire of seeing him, which was so lively as to hurry her into an indiscretion of which she was afraid the world took but too much notice (231). Even though Madame Des Roches vows to conquer a passion, which could only make her life wretched if it continued (231), when she writes to Arabella over two months later, she has given up any such attempt: Arabella indirectly relates a letter in which Madame Des Roches vows, she will never marry, nor enter into an engagement which would make it criminal in her to remember him with tenderness (300). In fact, transcribing directly from this letter proves impossible even for outspoken Arabella, who admits that there is a certain fire in her style,…her expressions are much stronger than those in which I have given you the sense of them (300). And when she appears, still later, to see Arabella off on her return to England, her passion is still unquenched, so much so that penning a letter—the most important mode of communication in this epistolary work—proves next to impossible: She has wrote four or five letters to him [Rivers], since she came on board, very tender ones I fancy, and destroyed them; she has at last wrote a mere complimentary kind of card, only thanking him for his offers of service (325). This card accompanies her wedding gifts for Rivers and Emily: a sword-knot and a diamond cross, which, as Mary Jane Edwards speculates, bear connotations of war and Catholicism, leading one to wonder whether open friendship or secret hatred was the true child of Madame Des Roches' rejected love (25). Where the protagonists share a debate about love's variety that culminates in their several harmonious unions, Madame Des Roches's feelings persistently outstrip the available limits and her story ends not in matrimony but in the vow that she will live and die a batchelor (431).

With a passion that overcomes her own individual reason, stretches social propriety, defies literal transcription or self-expression, rejects matrimony, and ignores divides between English and French and between Old World and New, Madame Des Roches becomes a focal point of Gothic emotional excess—a figure expressing the unmanageable longings at work in a colonial space from which the novel ultimately retreats. Seen in her colonial-Gothic dimension, Madame Des Roches may be read as a kind of madwoman in the Kamaraskas. Rejected, peripheralized, left behind—but undeniably attractive in her passionate, independent, almost threatening subjectivity—her figure reflects English Canada's troubled and ambivalent engagement with selfhood and with French Canada, demonstrating what William Hughes and Andrew Smith describe as the potential for disruption and redefinition vested in the relationship between Self and Other, controlling and repressed, subaltern milieu and dominant outsider culture (1). Though her desires cannot be met or indeed even interpreted by the English speakers who admit their failure to transcribe her accurately, Madame Des Roches nonetheless presents a crucial alternative to the insular, monocultural life of the English protagonists who retreat to their stifling hereditary British estates.

Brooke's work is not a Gothic novel in other ways. The landscape that Arabella describes is for the most part a delightful scene of picturesque beauty and social amusement. Only in the environs of Madame Des Roches's home does the deadly potential of an unforgiving and isolating nature assert itself. And only in her case do loving feelings manifest in unstable and unresolvable attempts to transgress boundaries between cultures and continents. Did the colonized figure of the French-Canadian woman create an unanticipated Gothic eruption in a text otherwise bounded by Brooke's imperial convictions? Perhaps that puts it too fancifully, but as the Canadian scene at the time of the conquest went on to become a site of special imaginative importance to Canadian literature of the nineteenth century, versions of this figure emerged in new guises, increasingly as heroines, and they too seem to ignite the Gothic propensities of writers not otherwise engaged in works of overtly Gothic fiction.

Julia Catherine Beckwith's novel does not fit easily into generic categories. Alfred Bailey says it resembles the picaresque and romantic literature of the time, and Turcotte suggests that it is a sensationalist romance, which attempts to eschew the Gothic influence but returns to its excesses, in a predictable novel of kidnapping, multiple weddings and flimsy historical account ( 50). Though other genres compete for dominance in the text, the novel's complex, almost labyrinthine plot—including terrifying adventures at sea, a nine-year underground imprisonment in a silver mine, and a heroine who narrowly avoids marrying her own brother—bears all the marks of Gothic excess. A close reading of the novel's Gothic vein suggests that these excesses underscore an acute anxiety about the duality and concomitant fragility of the family in the Canadian New World—torn not only between Old World and New but also between English and French identities. The catastrophes of the novel are the separations that occur between family members caught in the ebb and flow of colonial migration and in the violent conflict at the time of the conquest. Mending these ruptured families, meanwhile, leads ultimately to the healing union of French and English that Beckwith proposes in the culmination of her circuitous and allegorical plot.

Beckwith came from a family that blended English and French, a legacy that undoubtedly informs her fiction (Lochhead xix). Unlike Brooke, whose writing career was well-established before she wrote , Beckwith was a young writer—only seventeen when she began the novel—without previous publication; nonetheless, she may be seen to be drawing upon popular literary conventions, like the use of convents, embedded narratives, and surprise family likenesses, and innovating upon them in ways that suited her Canadian setting and perspective.

From the title of , you would expect Gothic uncanniness to reside inside a secretive convent from which the heroine must escape. Apart from one dishonest priest who suppresses a few letters, though, the convent holds no deep secrets, and proves congenial to the formation of important female friendships. Beckwith thus capitalizes on the curiosity that drew readers to convent narratives, but her novel does not reproduce the anti-Catholicism conventional of metropolitan Gothic fiction, and this in itself suggests a burgeoning Canadian sensibility that recognized Catholicism as part of a cultural landscape that included both French and English and that even brought them together, as it does the characters of Adelaide (French) and Charlotte (English) who attend the convent to finish their educations, and who ultimately discover they are not just compatriots but cousins.

Though there is a naïveté in the novel's inexpert use of genre, its excessive use of disaster and coincidence, its blithe doling out of inheritances, and its unproblematic joining of French and English Canada through marriage and the return of swapped babies, the novel's almost rhapsodic optimism may be read not only as a natural product of Beckwith's own multicultural origins, but also as a deliberate, even prescriptive, instrument of healing, a function characteristic of Gothic productions that delve into a wounded history so that a healing process may be set in motion. William Veeder sees Gothic literature as a cultural product stemming from the basic fact that societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds. Gothic literature from the later eighteenth century to the present is one such mechanism (54, original emphasis). He explains that through its transgressive qualities, Gothic literature opens up to view that which the society, to its own detriment, has repressed and policed: A Gothic text positions its reader in a potential space where the psyche's repressed desires and the society's foreclosed issues can be engaged and thus where healing may occur (65). Beckwith's novel, for the most part, avoids the actual scene of battle between English and French, focusing instead upon events either prior or subsequent to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham , and upon female characters parted from their loved ones. But she does permit herself one battlefield scene, and the Gothic emphasis she invokes in her description, as well as its focalization through the traumatized French–Canadian speaker, Philip de Montreuille, suggest her desire to lay bare the wounds so formative of Canada's vexed English–French relations: I was awakened as from a trance, by the falling of a heavy shower of rain, which revived me. All was enveloped in the deepest gloom. Groping around, I felt a number of dead bodies, which recalled to my remembrance the engagement of the preceding day, and I then discovered that I was left for dead on the field of battle. At length the rain ceased, and the moon burst forth resplendent in that mild majesty noticed by your great poet, Milton. Her beams discovered to my terrified sight the horrors of the surrounding scene. The ground was covered with the dead bodies of the French and English, mingled indiscriminately. All were equal in the sleep of death. The intervals between the bodies served as channels to streams of purple gore. From this terrifying sight I turned my eyes on myself—poor relief! My appearance made me recoil with horror! My clothes were covered with purple gore, shaded with red, where the rain had partly washed it away.…At length, exhausted with pain and fatigue, I seated myself on a large stone, and fixed my eyes on the sea,…I perceived a boat full of men rowing towards me, and, before I could resolve what to do, they landed, and perceiving me, they rushed forward, and surrounded the stone on which I sat. It was then I first discovered they were English, and felt all the horrors of my situation! (107–08) Much of the novel's plot, and therefore its allegorical burden, hinge upon this moment, for once Philip is presumed dead by his family and taken by these English privateers, he is lost to his country and family for over a decade, and it will take the detective work of the younger generation to set matters right. For the generation of French Canadians who experience the British conquest directly, then, the effects are horrific in the immediate, and devastating in the long term, and it is as if to punctuate this crucial narrative moment—and this formative trauma in Canadian history—that Beckwith employs a Gothic imagery and vocabulary of darkness, horror, and death. Philip's trials take the narrative to its greatest extremes: after these events he is enslaved underground in a Mexican silver mine for nine years. His wife, Julia Catherine, meanwhile, loses her two remaining daughters and, as Carl Murphy puts it, She seeks refuge in the spirituality of the convent where she is a symbol of New France in defeat (8). There, she too is presumed dead by her loved ones. Following in the pattern identified by Veeder whereby the culture's repressed and unhealed wounds are opened to view in the interest of a healing process, the novel reveals the traumas of Philip de Montreuille and Julia Catherine through embedded narratives gently solicited by trusted English listeners who then take action in the narrative proper to heal the broken family. Beckwith makes this the task of Adelaide and Charlotte, the French-English cousins who are also Julia Catherine's metaphorical daughters, having received their spiritual guidance at her hands.

Where the older-generation Philip and Julia Catherine seem to ex-perience all the disaster of a Gothic tale, younger-generation Adelaide experiences instead the joys of coincidence. In a cheerful version of the uncanny, where what is strange leads back to what is known of old and long familiar (Freud 825), Adelaide frequently experiences the uncanny sensation of confronting her closest relatives each time she is introduced to a perfect stranger. Upon meeting Charlotte's aunt, our young Canadian was so violently agitated, that she could with difficulty support herself (71), and for this lady's daughter, whom she meets the same day, we find she felt a secret sympathy (71). These, in due course, turn out to be her true mother and sister. The allegory is neatly explained by Murphy, who writes, When Adelaide de St. Louis learns that she is actually Lady Louisa Dudley, the central conceit of the work becomes clear. The Canadian nobility and the English aristocracy are completely identical. At their root, at the beginning, in infancy, as it were, the two cultures are interchangeable (8).

Beckwith's plot goes to especially great lengths to restore family members who were presumed dead. A case of twins divided at birth (both christened Julia) allows for the tragic death of one to be followed in due course by the joyful restoration of the other to its long-suffering mother, also Julia. One senses a certain delight, here, in the creative freedom that allows Beckwith to give not one but three characters her own name, one of whom, we learn, was indeed an extraordinary child; never did she merit a reprimand (41). In Adelaide's discovery of her dual cultural origins and in the doubled and tripled Julias, the French-Canadian heroine undergoes an intriguing multiplication process. Sugars and Turcotte argue that post­colonial Gothic has the ability to convey experiences of ambivalence and/or split subjectivity resulting from the inherent incommensurability of conflicted subject positions that have emerged from a colonial context and persisted into the present (xi). specializes in identities lost, obscured, and imprisoned in the wake of the British conquest, a destruction almost fatal to the family whose dismemberment across Old and New worlds is experienced as a species of living death and permanent mourning; but it specializes equally in identities doubled, discovered, and revived. With the healing powers inherent in a Gothic exposure of old wounds to the influence of an emphatically vital second generation, what was thought to be dead is joyfully restored, and the doubled and disoriented identities are shown to have been the best kind all along.

Beckwith expresses deep family feeling toward French Canada and in this she resembles Rosanna Leprohon, whose own marriage blended her family's Irish roots with her husband's French heritage, and whose novel was enthusiastically embraced in translation by French-Canadian readers for its sympathetic portrayal of French Canada's sufferings under British conquerors. In her creation of a vulnerable French-Canadian protagonist, Leprohon encourages readers to identify with a heroine who is suffering the effects of subordination at the hands of a tyrannical, even pathological representative of the British in Canada. Although Heather Murray points out in her Afterword that the book draws upon Gothic convention, extended analysis along these lines has not been carried out, and the novel is seldom mentioned in overviews of Canadian Gothic, even though Antoinette is a characteristically traumatized Gothic heroine. Forbidden by her father from forming any attachment to Montreal's new British occupants, Antoinette allows herself to be pressured into a secret marriage with the dangerously seductive British major, Audley Sternfield, whose motivations prove monetary not romantic and who tyrannizes over his bride with a sinister combination of physical and sexual intimidation. Though the personal narrative of Antoinette's sufferings remains consistently central in the novel, Leprohon periodically reminds her readers of the political ordeals faced by the French in the wake of the conquest: a recent visitor to Quebec reports that it is all ruins and ashes (178), and an innkeeper who savagely lashes a local man's horse about the head is identified as one of the newly arrived colonists who have come to lord it over ourselves and fallen fortunes (179). The novel is thus a purposeful study of the politics of domination, examined simultaneously on the intimate level of Gothic gender politics between fathers, daughters, and lovers, and on the cultural and national scale between English and French Canada.

Readers of the novel agree that Leprohon's romance narrative, like the many marriages in , serves as an allegory for the union of French and English in a united Canadian nation. But where Beckwith's marriage plot celebrates both sides as equally deserving partners, Leprohon embeds in her portrayal a strong critique of the British, whose unfairness is exemplified not just in their dealings with the French but in the sexism that Leprohon represents as endemic to their character and as perhaps suggestive of the pervasiveness of English Canada's will to dominate. As Hughes and Smith explain, Empire, in Gothic writings, is frequently conducted at a personal level, where the invasive urge and its frequently negative consequences hold a synecdochal relationship to excesses committed under numerous names in diverse theatres of culture (2). Though Sternfield and Evelyn are presented as a contrasting pair of suitors to the heroine—one worthy, one deceitful—they both betray habitually misogynistic attitudes that victimize Antoinette, and that reveal Leprohon's ability to use the historical French–English conflict to comment on politically charged social and gender relationships, as much an issue in her own day as in the previous century.

In fact, the critical turn in Leprohon's portrayal of the English is innovative in itself. Sunnie Rothenburger identifies a pattern in English-Canadian fiction by two male writers of this era; she notes that in both Parker's and Kirby's , a duality is created on the French side by representing an honourable French-Canadian figure in contrast to a corrupt, often Gothic, figure tied to la vieille France: However, she continues, it is crucial that in , writing from his imperialist perspective, Parker does not create the same severance between Canada and Britain that he does between Canada and France. No corrupt Englishmen appear to distinguish the English-speaking Canadian male from the British male; Robert [the novel's protagonist] can be both British and Canadian (109). reverses this pattern; Evelyn and Sternfield represent two sides to the British identity: one honourable, responsible, and compassionate in its use of power (thus ultimately worthy of joining the Canadian social body), the other, deceitful, monstrous, and tyrannical. Leprohon's reversal of the convention identified by Rothenburger is significant, for it undoes the clear imperialism of the standard pattern. Leprohon's novel reveals the villainous side of English Canada's own predecessors, and it is only through an acculturation from English to French (Evelyn's perfect bilingualism and adherence to Catholicism, as well as his symbolic replacement of headstrong British horses with a steadier Canadian team) that a union can be sanctioned. For tyrannical Sternfield, of course, death is the only option. The novel as a whole may be read as a kind of Gothic nightmare that—in cathartic mode—forces Antoinette to live out the dark side of Canada's English–French relationship as a torturous union of coercion, oppression, and abuse; only by confronting this monstrous version of the Canadian social body, can the narrative allow Antoinette and the reader the relief of the more carefully and responsibly chosen path.

May Agnes Fleming's , like , establishes a contrasting pair, this time distinguishing the deceptive British suitor from the worthy English Canadian, with French Canada appearing in the setting and secondary characters. The novel follows the romantic lives of three sisters in Danton Hall, the Quebec family home on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Eldest sister Kate, beautiful, and stately, and proud as a queen (17), has been educated in England, and is engaged to the youngest son of a British lord, against whom the Canadian would-be suitor feels outranked: What chance has an aspiring young doctor against the son of a lord? (17). The doctor nonetheless proves his heroic credentials early on, when he rescues the sisters from an assault by two drunken British redcoats, an incident that warns against too trusting a reliance upon Canada's British family allegiance. Kate's development hinges upon the renunciation of her queenly ways and her discovery of the Canadian doctor's true worth. Though the French-Canadian element is more muted here, Fleming employs it quite deliberately not only as a romantic backdrop beset by violent winter storms, but also as a site from which to articulate a suspicion of Old World British alliances: the reverence for aristocratic titles is proved repeatedly in the novel to be a dangerous delusion, and now, far from sending couples to Europe for a happy ending, the only one whose marriage takes her there is punished with bitter lifelong regret. The happy marriages teach English Canada to unite—regardless of English or French—with homegrown Canadian matches.

Though English-Canadian fiction about Quebec has typically been treated as a single category, the novels I have discussed are diverse in how they negotiate degrees of cultural difference and/or resemblance, and in how they imaginatively resolve the conflicts that they represent as fundamental to the nation's origins and identity. In , marital bliss unites with carefully calculated inheritances to require a return to British ancestral estates; the representative inhabitant of Canada, meanwhile, is left behind, alone forever in a state of Gothic irresolution. In , though we see French–English unions celebrated enthusiastically and emblematically to heal the wounds revealed in embedded Gothic recitals of Canada's personal histories, Beckwith hesitates at finding a home for her couples in Canada; European inheritances once again call characters home to Old World ancestral estates. does allow for a resolution on Canadian soil, once the poisonous Gothic version of the French–English union has been rejected and replaced by its reformed and benevolent mirror image. And in , with Fleming's suspicion of British titles and imperious ways, and her validation of homegrown Canadian ties, we see how, by the late nineteenth century, the cultural values at work in this self-consciously Canadian literary subgenre, though consistently influenced by colonial preoccupations, have shifted from strong imperial sentiment to decided national commitment. These changing attitudes toward Canada's imperial ties in turn influence the representation of Canada's own internal duality.

Writers of the nineteenth century were energetically engaged in the creation of a homegrown literature that would articulate the potential for a Canadian literary tradition, as well as explore an imaginatively rendered Canadian history. Looking to the British conquest of New France as the wellspring for this critical project created a fiction immersed in deeply felt cultural conflict and committed to the working through of traumatic colonial legacies. English-Canadian women writers embraced this conflict and let it emerge in Gothic constructions, especially in the creation of carefully doubled and internally divided heroines, who expressed Canada's inner conflicts through their trials as the protagonists of domestic romance. Though sustained literary recognition has, for the most part, eluded this body of fiction, when placed into conversation, these novels reveal an important side of Canada's literary development, particularly in the tradition of women's writing and Canadian Gothic.