Maria Chapdelaine is the story of the titular Maria who, after the man she loves dies, must choose between two suitors and two ways of life -- one in the big city, the other in the countryside. Written with a French and Quebecois adolescent audience in mind, Maria Chapdelaine has become a mainstay of school curricula, both in its original French and in translation, and has been extensively analyzed and adadpted to stage and screen.
Louis Hémon (1880-1913) was a French writer, most famous for his novel Maria Chapdelaine. He moved to French Canada in 1911, when he wrote Maria Chapdelaine while working on a farm in the Lac Saint-Jean region. He died in 1913, before witnessing the widespread success of the noel.