Gabrielle Roy kept up, throughout her literary life, a regular correspondence with relatives, friends, business relations and readers: to date, more than 2000 letters have been preserved in different archive collections. The 482 letters she wrote to her husband, Doctor Marcel Carbotte, between 1947 and 1979, form the largest subset of the correspondence; a critical edition of these hitherto unpublished letters is presented in the second part of the thesis. / Surprisingly, the correspondence contains few reflexions of an aesthetic nature, and few explicit traces of the novelist's published work, apart from occasional references to the texts she is working on at the moment she is writing to Marcel. Instead, it is the details of her day-to-day life that Roy describes most abundantly. In the first part of the thesis, we study the letters to Marcel in the light of a possible connection with Roy's canonical work: we start by examining the link between the letter and autobiographical genre; we then show that the letters to Marcel can be read as a personal diary; finally, we suggest that the "autobiographical turn" taken by Roy in both her published work and her letters to Marcel indicates that the letters form part of the same system as the autobiographical works.

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