Boundaries, borders, and barriers: Marie-Claire Blais and the archival adventure

Literary archives often reflect the individual writer, and, in the case of Marie-Claire Blais, especially illustrate her complexity An overall picture of the core Blaisian archival collections, including media, in Canada, the United States, and France is briefly presented, with some discussion of challenges posed for the researcher concerning their access and use. To illustrate some insights afforded into Blais's literary development in the first 10 years of her career, letters from three archives, the Fonds Judith Jasmin in Montreal, the Wilson collections at Yale University, and the Barbara Deming Papers at Radcliffe College, are studied together with related material from Blais's memoir Parcours d'un ecrivain: Notes americaines, Wilson's published letters and diaries, and Mary Meigs's autobiography Lily Briscoe. A Self-Portrait. Some observations and ideas concerning multidimensional innovators such as Blais and the archival issues thus raised are explored, with a suggested role for our national institutions.