Catherine Leroux on giving a voice to a Jane Doe with Madame Victoria
Catherine Leroux is an award-winning writer and translator and journalist based in Montreal. She was shortlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novel The Party Wall, which is an English translation of her French-language linked short story collection Le mur mitoyen.
Her latest work is called Madame Victoria. It's based on the real-life story of a woman's skeleton found in the woods near Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital in 2001. The woman deemed 'Madame Victoria' was never identified, but in a series of stories translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler, Leroux imagines the many different versions of this mysterious woman's life.
An unknown woman
"They knew she was, at the time of death, post-menopause. She had osteoporosis, so she was probably in her 50s. She was a white woman and had signs of malnutrition that could be indicative of a some sort of grave illness — consistent with the fact that she was found near the hospital. What is strange is the skeleton was wearing scrubs. So there was a question of whether she was a patient or an employee of the hospital."
The unknown woman
"I had, in the back of my mind, an idea of a book that would be constituted of a series of portraits of women. That's how that the idea of the book was born. There is just something so tragic and impossible to understand about the fact that a woman would die so alone in the middle of such a big city."
What's in a name
"There's such a paradox I wanted to play with because Victoria is probably one of the most well-known female names in the Western Hemisphere. It's a glorious name. It's attached to an era, a queen, an architectural style, human morality — it is attached to so many things. In the case of Madame Victoria, it is what the investigators were calling her while working on her case. So Victoria became a synonym for Jane Doe."