Sidonie de la Houssaye

Life & Legacy

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.