The best memorial to the lives of Catharine Parr Trail and Susanna Moodie is the angel above the Moodie grave in Belleville cemetery. A stalwart figure in her carved robe and mossy wings, she towers over her neighbours and holds her arm aloft in defiance of the winds from the Bay of Quinte. In her hand she clutches a star—symbol, perhaps, of the immigrant’s hope that a better future lies ahead, and that he or she can control it. It is unlikely that the two Strickland sisters who came to Canada ever felt in control of their destiny. Yet as each neared the end of her own long life, with beloved children close by, she would have acknowledged that the journey had been worthwhile. Each had arrived in the New World a writer, and had continued writing despite hardship. Each had seen most of her children happily settled. Both had watched the rough-and-ready colony of 1832 embark on its transformation into a remarkably vigorous, prosperous nation. And through their books, both women had themselves helped to shape the culture of their adopted country—Catharine through her descriptions of landscape and natural history; Susanna through her portrayals of pioneer experiences and colonial society.
Yet today, one hundred years after Catharine’s death, she and Susanna would find modern Canada unrecognizable. Only two of their various dwellings survive: the Moodies’ pleasant stone cottage on Belleville’s Bridge Street and Catharine’s beloved Westove in Lakefield. These homes are now jostled by brick and clapboard neighbours of much more recent date, with car ports, swing sets and gas barbecues in their yards. The rest of the log cabins and cramped cottages in which the sisters scraped and scribbled in Ontario are long gone. We have moved far beyond sagas of wilderness survival and tales of rural life.
Hamilton Township, where the Moodies spent their miserable early months, is now dotted with gentrified farmhouses to which Torontonians drive, along a six-lane highway, for country weekends. Trailer parks and campgrounds crowd onto the south shore of Rice Lake, which Catharine described so lovingly in Canadian Crusoes. You can find historical plaques here and there, commemorating Susanna’s log cabin on Lake Katchewanooka, or the sites of Wolf Tower and Oaklands, the Traill homes on the Rice Lake Plains. But on the plaque that is planted firmly in the middle of Lakefield to mark Susanna’s connections with the village, Catharine’s name is misspelled. The most handsome mansion in Lakefield remains The Homestead: a yellow brick reminder that the only Strickland who was a successful pioneer was Sam.
The marble angel that marks the Moodie grave in Belleville cemetery.
Yet the legacy of Susanna and Catharine is as sturdy as Sam’s mansion or the Moodie angel in the Belleville cemetery. Their most important books are still in print. More than a century has passed since the sisters’ deaths, but plenty of contemporary Canadians have shared the feelings they captured on paper about emigration, and their ambivalent relationship with a landscape both majestic and savage. Every new Canadian who thinks longingly of “home” and every brave adventurer who sets off into the bush, brushing off black-flies and marvelling at nature, is following in the sisters’ footsteps.