Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [0]
National Bestseller
Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award 2000 for the Non-Fiction Book of the Year
Winner of the 1999 Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History
Shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award
A Globe 100 Book of 1999
“Everyone knows the stories of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, but not until this double biography has so much been revealed about the sisters who founded a literary tradition in Canada.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“Richly detailed and wonderfully written … Gray [exhibits] an uncommon ability to tell a compelling story … evocative … superb …”
—The London Free Press
“Sisters in the Wilderness is a masterly biography.… [A] particularly moving … portrait of pioneer life: the raw landscape, the endless journeys, the hazards of travel, the terrors of lonely settlements.”
—Calgary Herald/Ottawa Citizen
“A captivating double biography.”
—Financial Times
“Simply one of the most delightful books you’ll ever read. What’s more, you don’t have to be a Canadian to enjoy it.”
—The Canada Post
“A fine and astringent book … what distinguishes this book is—a most enviable quality in any biography—a superb trustworthiness. That trust is born out of intelligence and sympathy alike.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Charlotte Gray’s exciting new biography, the beautifully-illustrated Sisters in the Wilderness, brings these women to life beyond their books.”
—The Hamilton Spectator
“A major contribution … Gray is equally forthcoming with detail about life in the bush and towns of 19th century Canada…. I was thoroughly engrossed…. Sisters is a keeper that will be useful in many ways for a long time to come.”
—Toronto Star
“Many delights [in] this superb biography.”
—Quill & Quire, starred review
“In Charlotte Gray’s wonderful new biography, [the sisters] are brought to life as two remarkable women whose close relationship never faltered throughout their long and often challenging lives…. Gray draws a compelling and insightful picture of these two very different women and the time in which they lived…. With meticulous research and an immensely readable style, Gray chronicles the sisters’ never-ending struggles and their eventual rise to literary fame…”
—National Post
“Gray has produced a fascinating examination of two of this country’s seminal woods-and-prairies writers … [an] entertaining and honest picture of two plucky gentlewomen’s thrashings in the bush.”
—Edmonton Journal
“Hats off to Gray for providing a vehicle that allows us to see these literary revolutionaries in a new, remarkably humanistic light.”
—The Calgary Straight
“Vivid…. Gray peels away the hoary stereotypes to reveal the tumultuous lives of two sisters whose prolific writings added immensely to cultural life in the young colony. Sisters in the Wilderness is a meticulously researched historical account graced with the narrative drive, elegant prose and complex characters of an accomplished novel…. Gray’s biography is a winning remedy for the oversights of history.”
—Maclean’s
“Gray’s fascinating biography … offers us an old-fashioned adventure story for girls, a tribute to the moxie of two remarkable women.… Gray memorably contrasts [their] ordeals …”
—Telegraph-Journal (Saint John, NB)
“Gray has done a commendable job presenting two most interesting lives.”
—The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)
“Charlotte Gray is a superb storyteller and that is what this country desperately needs now that our history has been so shamefully ignored by our educational system.”
—Pierre Berton
PENGUIN CANADA
SISTERS IN THE WILDERNESS
CHARLOTTE GRAY is one of Canada’s best known writers and biographers, and the award-winning author of several bestsellers, including Reluctant Genius: The Passions and Inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King. An adjunct research professor in the department of history at Carleton University, Gray sits on the boards of both the Dominion Institute and the Canadian National History Society. She and her