The Several Lives of Joan the Spinner

This essay is a study of Honoré Beaugrand’s Jeanne la filieuse. Beaugrand’s work, a fictional narrative of French Canadian migration to New England originally published in serial form in 1878, is at once a political tract on emigration and French Canadian society, a pioneering diasporic novel, and a muckraking study of New England industrialism. Shanahan shows how the appearance of multiple editions of the work, spaced across time and national borders, highlights the shift in meanings and the conflicting messages intended to be drawn from it by its publishers. The essay was originally published in the journal Je Me Souviens.