French-Canadian explorers, traders, and soldiers feature prominently in this country's storytelling, but little has been written about their female counterparts. In Along a River, award-winning historian Jan Noel shines a light on the lives of remarkable French-Canadian women — immigrant brides, nuns, tradeswomen, farmers, governors' wives, and even smugglers — during the period between the settlement of the St. Lawrence Lowlands and the Victorian era.

Along a River builds the case that inside the cabins that stretched for miles along the shoreline, most early French-Canadian women retained old fashioned forms of economic production and customary rights over land ownership. Noel demonstrates how this continued even as the world changed around them by comparing their lives to those of their contemporaries in France, England, and New England.Exploring how the daughters and granddaughters of the filles du roi adapted to their terrain, turned their hands to trade, and even acquired surprising influence at the French court, Along a River is an innovative and engagingly written history.

Jan Noel is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Jan Noel's profile page

‘Noel’s extraordinarily rich book traces the experiences and contributions of women in Canada from the 1630s to the 1850s… This book is a fine work of scholarship that will no doubt prove highly useful to scholars of the colonial Americas and the history of women.’

H-France vol 16:09:2016

‘Noel has crafted a work of academic scholarship that is bound to become a part of the Canadian history cannon… Highly recommended.’

Choice Magazine; vol 51:05:14

‘Noel does an outstanding job of placing women in the context of familial fur-trade enterprises and within noble military families…The considerable strides made in the history of women in New France is evident from this well-written book.’

American Historical Review - vol 119:03:2014