Sidonie de la Houssaye

Sidonie de la Houssaye

Sidonie de la Houssaye, born Hélène Perret, pen name Louise Raymond (Edgard, Louisiana, August 17, 1820 – February 18, 1894) was an American-born French language writer of Louisiana Creole descent.

The daughter of Creoles Ursin Perret and Françoise Pain, she received a bilingual education in English and French while living in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana. She married Alexandre Pelletier de la Houssaye when she was thirteen years old, and they had eight sons and one daughter together.

After her husband's death during the American Civil War, she worked as a school teacher in Franklin, Louisiana for an all girls' school that she had created. In the 1870s, she began writing a series of stories for children that express the social conflicts of Civil War-era Louisiana, touching on themes including the history of slavery, animosity between Anglophone versus Francophone Louisianans, and Indigenous people in Louisiana. In the 1880s, she wrote and published the novel Pouponne et Balthazar (1888) about a young Acadian couple who fled from Canada to Louisiana when the British evicted them. She is best known for her 1895 book Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle Orléans (The Quadroons of New Orleans).

Sidonie de La Houssaye was the only widely published woman among nineteenth-century Louisiana authors who wrote in French.

Works

• Contes d'une grand-mère louisianaise
  • "Les Petits Soldats"
  • "Les Petits Soldats" manuscript
• Pouponne et Balthazar, 1888
• Amis et Fortune
• Les Quarteronnes de La Nouvelle Orléans (posthumous tetralogy published from 1895 in Le Méchacébé)

Gina la quarteronne

Dahlia la quarteronne

Octavia la quarteronne

Violetta la quarteronne

Recent editions

Louisiana-based publisher Les Éditions Tintamarre has published several works by de la Houssaye in recent years, continuing the press's commitment to preserving Louisiana's Francophone literary heritage.

• Contes d’une grand-mère louisianaise, introduction and notes by Jonathan Vidrine, Les Éditions Tintamarre, 2007 (ISBN 0-9754244-1-6)
• Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans, tome I, Octavia & Violetta, introduction and notes by Christian Hommel, Les Éditions Tintamarre, 2006 (ISBN 0-9754244-2-4)
• Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans, tome II, Gina la quarteronne, introduction and notes by Christian Hommel, Les Éditions Tintamarre, 2008 (ISBN 978-0-9793230-5-8)

Further reading

• Perret, Joseph John (1966). A Critical Study of the Life and Writings of Sidonie De La Houssaye With Special Emphasis on the Unpublished Works (PhD). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. Louisiana State University. 1164.
• Jones, Christine A. (2025-06-13). "The Ethics of Social Life in Sidonie de la Houssaye's Louisiana Tales". Humanities. 14 (6): 129. doi:10.3390/h14060129. ISSN 2076-0787.
• Hommel, Christian (August 2008). Réécriture du passé et paradigme du féminin dans Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans de Sidonie de La Houssaye [Rewriting of the Past and Paradigm of the Feminine in The Quadroons of New Orleans by Sidonie de la Houssaye] (PhD) (in French). The Pennsylvania State University, The Graduate School, College of the Liberal Arts.
• Harris, Christine Elizabeth Koch (May 2006). Liminality in Gender, Race, and Nation in Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans by Sidonie de la Houssaye (PhD). Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.
• Jones, Christine A. (2019). "Sidonie de la Houssaye's Fairy Tales: An American Lesson in Cultural Literacy". Marvels & Tales. 33 (1): 51. doi:10.13110/marvelstales.33.1.0051.
• Frakes, Jerold C. (October 2020). "Differential Racism: 'Quadroons', Anti-Semitism, and the Negotiation of Race in Sidonie de la Houssaye's Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans". French Studies. 74 (4): 536–553. doi:10.1093/fs/knaa147.
• Costello, Gina (January 2009). "Digitization of the French Language Sidonie de la Houssaye Papers". Microform & Imaging Review. 38 (4). doi:10.1515/mfir.2009.021.
• Greenwood, Mary (Spring–Summer 2017). "Blurring the Color Line: Racial and Sexual Thresholds in Sidonie de La Houssaye's Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orléans". Nineteenth-Century French Studies. 45 (3–4). University of Nebraska Press: 219–235. JSTOR 44627658.
• Harlet, Emma (Summer 2026). Créolité, Identité et Féminité Dans la Littérature Louisianaise du Long XIXe Siècle : Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Grace King, Sidonie de La Houssaye et Léona Queyrouze [Creoleness, Identity, and Womanhood in Louisiana Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century: Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Grace King, Sidonie de La Houssaye, and Léona Queyrouze] (PDF) (PhD) (in French). University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Université Bordeaux Montaigne. ProQuest 32857144.

External links

• Emma T. Stafford Sidonie de la Houssaye Collection Emma T. Stafford. Sidonie de la Houssaye Collection, Mss. 1445, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
• Sidonie de la Houssaye Papers Sidonie de la Houssaye Papers, Mss. 105, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
• www.louisiane.culture.fr
• mondesfrancophones.com
• Sidonie de la Houssaye Collection Emma T. Stafford Sidonie de la Houssaye Collection, Mss. 1445, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La. (accessed 2/18/2015)
• Pouponne et Balthazar on [archive.org]