LONGFELLOW’S CONNECTION TO CANADIAN HISTORY, FRENCH ACADIAN PLIGHT REVEALED IN EDGY NEW NOVEL

Just around the corner from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, MA, author Heidi Radford Legg has brought the poet’s most famous character, Evangeline, back to life – brimming with irreverence, willfulness and pluck.

In her debut novel My Evangeline, published today, Legg has created Eve LeBlanc -- a twenty-first-century incarnation of the Acadian heroine of Longfellow’s great epic poem, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.

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Like Longfellow’s Evangeline, Acadian Eve LeBlanc finds her fate shaped by political strife in Quebec and the inexorable lure of romantic love.  As Quebec votes on the 1995 referendum for independent statehood, eighteen-year-old Eve, a promising artist, must choose between the American man she loves, powerful family ties, and her close friendship with a key figure in Quebec’s sovereignty movement as well as its suspiciously narrow defeat. 

Eve also retraces the path of her literary namesake and her fellow Acadians who fled the violent British Expulsion in the 1750s and ‘60s by moving from Canada to the United States.  Like Longfellow’s poem, My Evangeline sheds light on Acadian history, French Canadian history, their distinct culture and identity and their impact on the U.S., where the Acadians ultimately gave rise to Louisiana’s Cajuns. 

“Having grown up in New Brunswick, Canada amid tributes to Longfellow’s Evangeline, I’ve always been fascinated by her. After settling in Cambridge, MA not far from the Longfellow House where Longfellow lived and worked for more than thirty years, I was compelled to explore how this great American poet found inspiration in my birthplace -- which surprisingly, he’d never visited and to which he had few ties.  In this coming-of-age story, My Evangeline sheds light on the exciting connection between Longfellow’s literature, French-Canadian history and Acadian culture while giving them relevance in the contemporary world with an edgy modern heroine young women today will strongly relate to,” said author Heidi Radford Legg.

My Evangeline also brings the Acadian spirit to life with vibrant scenes of daily life in the remote fishing town of Shediac, New Brunswick, where nearly everyone’s related, simple yet abundant harvest meals animated by fiddle music cement family life and decisions are dictated by duty to family and the sea.