1832 She was Catharine Parr Traill, and since she would be followed in under a month by Susanna Moodie, 1832 can really be counted an annus mirabilis of Canadian literature. Their maiden name was Strickland, and back home other sisters were also adding to the freight on library shelves. Elizabeth Strickland was author of Disobedience: or, Mind what Mamma Says (1819), while Agnes, who (like Susanna) also wrote children’s books, is best remembered as a historian and biographer, author of (among many other studies) the twelve-volume Lives of the Queens of England (1840–48). None of them had formal schooling.
Susanna and Catharine married friends from the Orkneys, both army officers. Lots of Scots were emigrating to Canada. Thomas Traill already had relatives there, while the older John Moodie, who had spent ten years in South Africa (and of course, in this literary environment, had written a book about it), was also disposed to join the flow. After landing at Montreal, where a plague of cholera was raging, Thomas and Catharine took the stage westwards for Cobourg, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, then headed north to Lakeland, in what Susanna would call ‘the bush’. John and Susanna first tried working an already cleared farm near Cobourg, but soon ran out of money, sold up and joined the Traills at Lakeland.
There they lived in log cabins, learned to manage everything from a horse and plough to a birch-bark canoe, and shared hopes, fears and practical tasks with their neighbours, like clearing land, building houses, pulling teeth and assisting at childbirth. But they didn’t go native. Susanna sent frequent sketches of her life in the bush to the Montreal Literary Garland, and Catharine wrote regular letters home to her literary family. In time these dispatches coalesced into their best-known books, Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852).
In these accounts and others, the sisters established a Canadian voice quite distinct from that of their contemporaries south of the border. Whereas American immigrants (especially on what they called the frontier, rather than the bush) tended to develop an ideology of initiation, in which they imagined themselves to have experienced a rite of passage into a freer, more independent way of life, the Canadians, having retained their connections with the British empire, were happy to foster a community, unashamed to ask for help, or even to admit that they were bored as often as exhilarated by the wilderness – that at times the New World felt (as Moodie would put it) like a ‘green prison’.
Maybe this is why Margaret Atwood, the doyenne of Canadian writing, gave the sixth (and best) volume of her poetry the title The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), and why her imagination was so captured by the determination of those early immigrants, who:
pretend this dirt is the future.
And they are right. If they let go
of that illusion solid to them as a shovel,
open their eyes even for a moment
to these trees, to this particular sun
they would be surrounded, stormed, broken
in upon by branches, roots, tendrils, the dark
side of light
as I am.