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and Elizabeth were forging their way through The Queens of England with terrifying speed; the ninth volume had just appeared, after the two Strickland sisters had spent months in the royal archives of England, Scotland and France reading old letters and documents. Agnes Strickland’s prose grew more lush with every crowned head she chronicled. Mary Beatrice of Modena, wife of James II, “comes before us,” the author claimed in the throbbing introduction to the new volume, “in her beauty, her misfortunes, her conjugal tenderness, and passionate maternity, like one of the distressed queens of tragedy, or romance struggling against the decrees of adverse destiny.” Perhaps it was the relentlessly uplifting tone of her sisters’ work that turned Susanna Moodie into a cold-eyed realist. If Susanna was going to be a myth-maker, her myths would be darker and more menacing than Agnes’s and Catharine’s rosy visions. Susanna had never shown any tolerance for hypocrisy and pretension. The young woman who had turned her back on the Church of England because it was too smug was not going to pretend that Upper Canada was a Wordsworthian paradise of charming rustics and noble empire-builders.

With customary single-mindedness, Susanna embarked on a record of her first seven years as a settler in Canada, from 1832 to 1839—“this great epoch of our lives,” as she called it. She jigsawed together into a coherent narrative the sketches and poems that had already been published, along with various anecdotes that she had been polishing for years. In addition, John prepared four chapters (covering such “factual” material as the operation of village hotels and land sales). By 1850, the Moodies had completed a manuscript that contained twenty-five chapters, eleven of which had already appeared in Canada. The bulky package of several hundred handwritten pages was sent off to the London publisher Richard Bentley, who had published John Moodie’s book, Ten Years in South Africa, fifteen years earlier.

Bentley, a clever, cosmopolitan man who always dressed immaculately in starched wing collar and cuffs, had the most prestigious list of authors in the English-speaking world. He had bought up the copyrights to Jane Austen’s six novels, and he published works by Anthony Trollope, Maria Edgeworth, Wilkie Collins and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Bentley’s office on New Burlington Street, close to Piccadilly, hummed with literary gossip as authors and literary patrons came and went. So it was a coup for Susanna when Bentley offered her fifty pounds as an initial payment for the new manuscript, plus a share of the profits. It was a modest advance: Bentley paid most of his authors between two hundred and three hundred pounds. But Susanna, it appears, was satisfied. The book was published in two volumes, priced at a one pound, one shilling, under the title Roughing It in the Bush, in 1852, the same year that Catharine’s children’s novel, Canadian Crusoes, appeared.

Susanna Moodie would never have claimed that her sketches added up to autobiography (such a term was barely known outside literary London in these years). She didn’t even have the temerity to call them “memoirs” or “reflections.” Her only non-fiction model was the kind of travel writing exemplified by Anna Jameson’s account of a visit to Canada, Winter studies and summer rambles in Canada, published in London in 1838. But she knew her own strengths as a writer. “A scene or picture strikes me as a whole, but I never can enter into details,” she explained to her publisher. “A carpet must be very brilliant, the paper on a wall very remarkable before I should ever notice either, while the absurd and the extravagant make lasting impressions, and I can remember a droll speech or a caricature face for years.” In her description of pioneer life, she exploited to the full her sense of the ridiculous, her ear for dialogue and her fascination with human behaviour. She strayed close to fiction at some points, as she obscured the identities of her subjects, stretched the facts to make a better story, and skewed the