Sidonie de La Houssaye, Octavia the Quadroon. Translated and with a Foreword by Michael Perret.

Longstanding misperceptions have held that in pre-Civil War New Orleans, women, especially women of color, were treated like things to be bought and disposed of, subject to the whims of the rich and privileged men who dominated the Creole city. Their story is crystalized in Octavia the Quadroon, where the powerful Judge Alfred D***, cut from the same cloth as so many men of his day, believes he can buy the beautiful Octavia as easily as he “could buy a horse.” Octavia’s reaction is not what he (or the reader) expects because she refuses to be limited by society’s perceptions of whom and what she should be. She is beautiful, of course, but more importantly, she is a creative and independent thinker capable of transgressing society’s expectations.

 Ah! but can she make the judge judge himself ?

Octavia the Quadroon broke deeply engrained taboos concerning race and gender and so shocked its readers in the early 1890s that Sidonie de La Houssaye, a seventy-year-old schoolmarm living in rural Louisiana, published it under a pseudonym. De La Houssaye certainly concocts a compelling story that will fill the reader with a sublime mixture of admiration and horror. In doing so, she creates one of the strongest female characters in all nineteenth-century American literature. Among depictions of women of color of the period, none can compare with Octavia.

If Creole New Orleans has long fascinated American readers, their knowledge of it has often been mediated by English speaking writers who could never quite penetrate that world. Octavia the Quadroon, on the other hand, was written by a woman whose life spanned nineteenth-century Louisiana and whose tales are underpinned by lived experience. Written originally in French, Michael Perret’s careful translation reveals this surprising corner of American literature to the English-speaking public for the first time.

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ISBN : 978-1-7353605-5-3