Historian, journalist and writer Micheline Lachance died of cancer last night. She was 78 years old.
Posted at 1:53 p.m.
Updated at 2:26 p.m.
“Micheline has been part of the Quebec America family for a very long time, so for us it’s a shock, a big shock, a big loss. Personally, for me, it was a role model, Micheline, so I am a little upset,” said the director general of Quebec America, Caroline Fortin. “Micheline was the precursor of the historical novel with The novel by Julie Papineau. »
Micheline Lachance has won numerous literary and journalistic awards during her career. Journalist at Newsauthor of an essay and a biography of Brother André, she was editor-in-chief of Chatelaine from 1989 to 1994.
She then left her job to devote herself to writing the Novel by Julie Papineau, one of the greatest successes of Quebec literature, published in 1995 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. This will be followed by the publication of historical novels in which women are often drawn from the shadows (The Fallen Girls, Lady Cartier, The Papineau Saga, Rue des Remparts…).
“Putting women at the forefront of my novels is a political and feminist gesture. Women, in our history, have been very influential, but this fact is largely unknown, “said Micheline Lachance in an interview on the show The big interviews.
During an interview with Newsfor the publication of Lady Cartier (in 2004), she confessed to living “with the fear of an anachronism”, which is why the research stage was so important in her writings. She then claimed to have “found her way” in the historical novel. “I who would have liked so much to live in the 19and century, I take great pleasure in telling stories, in putting myself in the shoes of my characters,” she said.
“For me, the great merit of historical novels is to make people want to know more, to light the flame of history. So you need solid historical and archival research. If the wires are hanging down, people feel it,” she told The Press in 2017, when the publication of Rue des Remparts.
The Société historique de Montréal awarded him a medal in 2017 for his contribution to history.
In 2021, she published a last more personal novel, Don’t wake the sleeping sorrowin which she is inspired by her job as a journalist in the 1980s.