Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are themselves the main sources for this book. Thanks to the New Canadian Library imprint of McClelland and Stewart, Catharine’s The Backwoods of Canada and Susanna’s Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings versus the Bush are still in print. The University of Ottawa Press has recently issued a collection of Susanna’s short narratives, under the title Voyages (1991, edited by John Thurston), and a collection of Catharine’s sketches, under the title Forest and Other Gleanings (1994, edited by Michael A. Peterman and Carl Ballstadt). Carleton University Press has reissued Catharine’s novel Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains (1986, edited by Rupert Schieder). I found original copies of all the other books that the sisters wrote in Canada in the Parliamentary Library and the National Library of Canada.
The sisters’ published works tell only half the story. For their personal letters I relied heavily on three volumes of their correspondence, published by the University of Toronto Press and edited by Professor Carl Ballstadt of McMaster University, Professor Elizabeth Hopkins of York University and Professor Michael A. Peterman of Trent University. The volumes are Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime (1985), Letters of Love and Duty, The Correspondence of Susanna and John Moodie (1993) and I Bless You in My Heart, Selected Correspondence of Catharine Parr Traill (1996). I used the Traill Family Collection in the National Archives of Canada, and the Patrick Hamilton Ewing Collection in the National Library of Canada, for additional letters from Catharine, and for letters from other members of the Strickland, Moodie and Traill families.
Given the importance of the Strickland sisters for students of both Canadian history and Canadian literature, there have been surprisingly few attempts to describe their lives in nineteenth-century Canada. The best, Audrey Y. Morris’s The Gentle Pioneers, appeared in 1966. Other useful biographical assessments of Catharine and Susanna are G.H. Needler’s Otonabee Pioneers, The Story of the Stewarts, the Stricklands, the Traills and the Moodies (1953); Clara Thomas’s essay on “The Strickland Sisters” in The Clear Spirit, edited by Mary Quayle Innis (Toronto, 1966); Marian Fowler’s The Embroidered Tent (1982). Michael Peterman’s Susanna Moodie: A Life (1999) elegantly traces the links between Susanna’s books and her life. Sara Eaton’s Lady of the Backwoods (1969) is a cheerful account for young readers of Catharine’s life.
There are two biographies of the formidable Agnes Strickland. The first is her sister Jane’s hagiography, published in 1887. The second is Una Pope-Hennessy’s Agnes Strickland, Biographer of the Queens of England (1940).
PRELUDE
Elizabeth Thompson discussed the Strickland sisters’ influence on subsequent writers in The Pioneer Woman, A Canadian Character Type (1991). Michael Peterman discussed the way subsequent writers have treated Susanna in This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1996).
Details of the Strickland family in England come from a variety of sources. They include Catharine’s reminiscences published in her book Pearls and Pebbles (1894); an interview with Susanna Moodie that I found in an 1884 issue of the Toronto Globe, in the Belleville Public Library; and material from the Traill Family Collection. Carole Gerson’s article on “Mrs. Moodies’s Beloved Partner” (Canadian Literature, No. 107, Winter 1985,pp. 34–45) was a corrective to much of the criticism John Moodie has suffered over the years.
To round out the picture of Suffolk in the early nineteenth century, I turned to Suffolk Scene by Julian Tennyson (1939); Rachel Lawrence’s Southwold River, Georgian Life in the Blyth Valley (1990); and A History of Suffolk by David Dymond and Peter Northeast Phillimore (1995). The comparison with the Austen family came to mind after I read Jane Austen, A Life by Claire Tomalin (1997).
I learned about the position of women in Regency England in Muriel Jaeger’s Before Victoria, Changing Standards of Behaviour 1787‒1837 (1967) and in Hyenas in Petticoats by Robert Woof, Stephen Hebron and Claire Tomalin (1997). Another book that provided useful background for lives of women during this period was A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets by Kathleen Jones (1998). I learned about London in the late 1820s from James Morris’s Heaven’s Command, An Imperial Progress (1973). Information about Mary Prince and Ashton Warner comes from Dr. Sandy Campbell, of the English Department at the University of Ottawa.
CHAPTER 4
I learned about Leith during a personal visit, and from Hamish Coghill’s Discovering the Water of Leith (1988). I never found a good modern account of Atlantic crossings in the 1830s, but I did discover Edwin C. Guillet, a prolific historian who wrote on a wide variety of topics I wanted to know about. His book The Great Migration, The Atlantic Crossing by Sailing-Ship 1770-1860 (1963) and his pamphlet Cobourg 1798-1948, written for the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Cobourg (1948), were both useful sources. Dr. Bruce Elliot of Carleton University and Caroline Parry (author of Eleanor’s Diary) both shared their knowledge of the emigrant ships with me.
CHAPTERS 5, 6 AND 7
I was able to imagine Cobourg in 1832 thanks to Katherine Ashenburg’s Going to Town, Architectural Walking Tours in Southern Ontario (1996) and a wonderful little memoir of “the early days” written by a longtime resident, Mrs. David Fleming, and published by the Oshawa and District Historical Society (1960). I got a sense of what Upper Canada looked like, and how newly arrived travellers responded to it, from Early Travellers in the Canadas, 1791-1867, edited by Gerald M. Craig (1955), and from three first-hand accounts: Our Forest Home, Being extracts from the correspondence of the late Frances Stewart edited by her daughter E.S. Dunlop (1902); A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, The Journals of Anne Langton edited by H.H. Langton (1950), and from John Langton’s Early Days in Upper Canada (1926).
Gentlemen Emigrants by Patrick Dunae (1981) explained what ill-suited pioneers the Traills and Moodies were. John Thurston’s The Work of Words, The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (1996) dealt with Susanna’s shock at her first taste of the New World. Carole Gerson explored the two women’s attitudes to native peoples, and pointed out how sympathetic they were, in her article “Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill” ( Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1997, Vol. 32,No. 2). Joan Holmes explained to me who the “Chippewa Indians” were.
CHAPTERS 8 AND 9
William Kilbourn gave us the best biography of William Lyon Mackenzie, and the liveliest account of the 1837 Uprising, in The Firebrand (1956). Donald Creighton provided more general accounts of the history of this period in The Story of Canada (1959) and in his magnificent biography John A. Macdonald, The Young Politician, The Old Chieftain (reprinted in one volume, 1998).
I spent happy hours in Belleville Public Library’s Canadiana Room, looking through old almanacs, county atlases and local histories for details of life in nineteenth-century Belleville. Information on George Benjamin came from Sheldon and Judith Godfrey’s lively and sympathetic Burn This Gossip: The True Story of George Benjamin of Belleville (1991). Information on Robert Baldwin came from J.M.S. Careless’s essay about him in the book he edited entitled The Pre-Confederation Premiers: Ontario Government Leaders, 1841-1867 (1980). For these two personalities, and most others mentioned in this book, I turned again and again to one of our greatest national publications: the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
CHAPTER 11
Three local historians supplied me with a wealth of wonderful detail about the residents of the Rice Lake area during the last century. Gore’s Landing and the Rice Lake Plains (1986) by N. Martin, C. Milne and D. McGillis brought home to me the spirit and eccentricity of so many early settlers. Rupert Schieder’s introduction to the Carleton University Press edition of Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1986) and Michael Peterman’s introduction to the Carleton University Press edition of Catharine’s The Backwoods of Canada (1997) covered Catharine’s experience with publishers, and the receptions accorded her books.
The most useful source on the slow and tortured development of the Canadian publishing industry is George L. Parker’s The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada (1985). I also looked at Royal A. Gettman’s A Victorian Publisher, A Study of the Bentley Papers (1960) and H. Pearson Gunday’s Book Publishing and Publishers in Canada before 1900 (1965).
CHAPTER 12
This chapter would have been impossible without a thoughtful and exhaustive thesis by Klay Dyer, entitled “A Periodical for the People, Mrs. Moodie and The Victoria Magazine” (unpublished thesis presented at the University of Ottawa, 1992). It shaped all my reactions when I read the original Victoria Magazine, now reprinted by the University of British Columbia Press.
Since Roughing It in the Bush is by far the best-known book by Susanna, it has repeatedly been put under the academic microscope. Among the most helpful analyses are two by Michael Peterman: “Roughing It in the Bush as Autobiography,” in Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature, edited by K.P. Stich (1988); and This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1996). A collection of essays which cast a new light on many aspects of Canadian women’s writing, and which I found helpful and provocative, was Re(dis)covering our Foremothers, edited by Lorraine McMullen (1990). I learned a lot from Alec Lucas’s contribution, “The Function of the Sketches in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush,” and Bina Freiwald’s “‘The tongue of woman’: The Language of the Self in Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush.”
CHAPTERS 13 AND 14
Most of the information in these chapters is contained in the exchange of letters between the Strickland sisters on each side of the Atlantic, and in Pope-Hennessy’s biography of Agnes Strickland. Samuel Strickland’s pioneer memoir, Twenty-seven years in Canada West, was first published in 1853, and was reprinted in 1970 by Hurtig.
CHAPTER 15
Most of the Moodie material in this chapter comes from Susanna’s letters, and from “‘A Glorious Madness,’ Susanna Moodie and the Spiritualist Movement” by Carl Ballstadt, Michael Peterman and Elizabeth Hopkins (Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 17,No. 4, Winter 1982-83). The nineteenth-century fascination with spiritualism has often been ignored by serious historians, while attracting the attention of twentieth-century believers. One of the best and most dispassionate accounts of the Fox sisters’ activities appears in The Spiritualists, The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century by Ruth Brandon (1983). I also looked at Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals by Howard Kerr (1972), and Geoffrey Nelson’s Spiritualism and Society (1969). For information about Victoria Woodhull, I read Barbara Goldsmith’s Other Powers, The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1998) and Mary Gabriel’s Notorious Victoria (1998). Ramsay Cook’s The Regenerators, Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (1985) gives the social context for the Moodies’ spiritualist activities.
CHAPTER 16
My principal sources for information about Orange Order activities in 1860 were Donald Creighton’s John A. Macdonald, The Young Politician, The Old Chieftain; Gerald M. Craig’s Upper Canada, The Formative Years; and Early Travellers in the Canada 1791-1867 (1955) edited by Gerald M. Craig. Audrey Y. Morris (The Gentle Pioneers) has produced the best account of John Moodie’s travails as sheriff.
CHAPTER 17
No aspect of the Strickland sisters’ achievements has been more neglected than Catharine’s interest in natural history. Two articles that explore Catharine’s activities are “‘Splendid Anachronism,’ The Record of Catharine Parr Traill’s Struggles as an Amateur Botanist in Nineteenth Century Canada” by Michael Peterman (Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers, edited by McMullen, 1990) and “Science in Canada’s Backwoods” by Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley (Natural Eloquence, Women Reinscribe Science, edited by Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Schteir, 1997). Another essay in the Gates and Schteir volume was also useful: Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Invisible Woman.” For background on science in nineteenth-century Canada, I read Suzanne Zeller’s Inventing Canada, Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (1987). Information on Catharine’s botanist friends comes from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. I was also helped by The Pioneer Woman by Elizabeth Thompson (1991) and “Catharine Parr Traill and the Picturesque Landscape,” a paper prepared for the Lakefield Literary Festival in 1998 by Elizabeth Hopkins.
There are marvellous local histories and early photographs of the Stony Lake area. Among those I used were Enid Mallory’s Kawartha, Living on These Lakes (1991); Jean Murray Cole’s Origins: The History of Dummer Township (1993); James T. Angus’s A Respectable Ditch: A History of the Trent-Severn Waterway, 1833-1920 (1988); Katharine N. Hooke’s From Campsite to Cottage, Early Stoney Lake (Peterborough Historical Society, 1992); and Richard Tatley’s Steamboating on the Trent-Severn (1978). The quotations from James Ewing Ritchie come from his travel book To Canada with Emigrants (1885).
CHAPTERS 19 AND 20
For a sparkling social history of late-nineteenth-century Ottawa, there is nothing to compare with The Private Capital: Ambition and Love in the Age of Macdonald and Laurier by Sandra Gwyn (1984). The quotation from Maria Thorburn was kindly sent to me by her great-great-granddaughter, Jane Monaghan. All the other family information in these pages comes from the Traill Family Collection in the National Archives of Canada and the Patrick Hamilton Ewing Collection in the National Library of Canada.
I found additional useful material in Ottawa, An Illustrated History by John H. Taylor, and in “Making Science Beautiful: The Central Experimental Farm, 1886–1939” by Julie Harris and Jennifer Mueller (Ontario History, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 2, June 1997). Maime Fitzgibbon’s A Trip to Manitoba, or Roughing It on the Line, appeared in 1880 and has not been reprinted.