Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In 1841, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow heard the story of Acadian lovers, separated by the Expulsion and reunited at the end of their lives. He elaborated this simple tale into his long narrative poem, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Published in 1847, it soon gained worldwide popularity, and by 1865, both North American and European French versions were in print.

In reinventing "the best illustration of the faithfulness and constancy of women that I have ever heard of or read," Longfellow offered Acadians a believable story about their ancestors. They adopted it as a distillation of their history, a true legend of their past. The tragic story of Evangeline and Gabriel has captivated Acadians and non-Acadians ever since.

Evangeline, the dutiful 17-year-old daughter of an elderly Grand Pré farmer, is in love with Gabriel, the blacksmith's son. Before the two can exchange vows, British soldiers march into the village, burn it to the ground, order the villagers into ships, and send them far from their Nova Scotia homeland. In the mayhem, Evangeline witnesses her father's death from a broken heart and loses sight of Gabriel. Her desperate continent-wide search for her childhood sweetheart — taking her from the cypress groves of Louisiana to a forest mission in the Ozark Mountains — is one of the most affecting accounts of unfulfilled love ever written. More phantom than woman by the end, Evangeline is a hero of mythic proportions.

This sumptuously produced commemorative edition of Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie coincides with the 400th anniversary of the founding of Acadia. As well as the complete text of the poem, it features more than 40 engravings from an enchanting Victorian Evangeline published in 1866 by Bell and Daldy, London.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780864928054

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was an American poet. Born in Portland, Maine, Longfellow excelled in reading and writing from a young age, becoming fluent in Latin as an adolescent and publishing his first poem at the age of thirteen. In 1822, Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and published poems and stories in local magazines and newspapers. Graduating in 1825, Longfellow was offered a position at Bowdoin as a professor of modern languages before embarking on a journey throughout Europe. He returned home in 1829 to begin teaching and working as the college’s librarian. During this time, he began working as a translator of French, Italian, and Spanish textbooks, eventually publishing a translation of Jorge Manrique, a major Castilian poet of the fifteenth century. In 1836, after a period abroad and the death of his wife Mary, Longfellow accepted a professorship at Harvard, where he taught modern languages while writing the poems that would become Voices of the Night (1839), his debut collection. That same year, Longfellow published Hyperion: A Romance, a novel based partly on his travels and the loss of his wife. In 1843, following a prolonged courtship, Longfellow married Fanny Appleton, with whom he would have six children. That decade proved fortuitous for Longfellow’s life and career, which blossomed with the publication of Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), an epic poem that earned him a reputation as one of America’s leading writers and allowed him to develop the style that would flourish in The Song of Hiawatha (1855). But tragedy would find him once more. In 1861, an accident led to the death of Fanny and plunged Longfellow into a terrible depression. Although unable to write original poetry for several years after her passing, he began work on the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and increased his public support of abolitionism. Both steeped in tradition and immensely popular, Longfellow’s poetry continues to be read and revered around the world.

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Reviews for Evangeline

[keylawk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Serene, relentless, first published in 1847, ninety-two years after the neutral town of Gran Pre was destroyed, and its inhabitants removed and separated, during the hostilities between new England and new France, in which Acadia was a pawn. The story of a girl separated from her lover in that derangement, grown old looking for each other, and finally finding each other again, on the threshhold of death.

[asphaltjunkie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Having grown up in Canada, this was required reading and I must say, it was, and remains, one of my favourites. It is hugely tragic, but incredibly interesting as a history.Longfellow's work details the exile of the French Acadians from Nova Scotia by the English in the mid-18th century, many of whom ended up in Louisiana (the word "cajun" being a bastardization of "acadian,") and the lifelong search of one woman named Evangeline for her love Gabriel from whom she was separated during the exile.There is some debate as to Evangeline's actual existence, but the fact is, whether she existed or not, under another name (as many believe) or not at all, but she is immortalized in a beautiful epic poem, in a parish in Louisiana and in a driving route in Nova Scotia. Longfellow's poem brings to the forefront an oft-neglected piece of both Canadian and American history in a beautiful, if tragic, story.

[janeajones · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Longfellow's classic poem about the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia is a bit creaky, but still intriguing for those who have never read it. The dactylic hexameter lines dance through the poem of love lost, love sought, resignation and the final culmination of spiritual transcendance. Longfellow's attempt to create a North American legend has spawned tourist attractions from Nova Scotia to Louisiana.