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knew how to work the land and could tolerate hardship as he slowly acquired property and prestige that were out of his reach back home. However, she warned, a penniless gentleman with no experience of manual labour could never prosper. Addressing the reader directly, she explained that any gentleman who crossed the Atlantic in order to reestablish social position lost at home would be ruined and disappointed: “If these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from sinking their property, and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house, and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.” She confessed that she and her husband had discovered that sustained effort and faith in God’s goodness were no guarantee of success in the backwoods.

Susanna had high expectations for sales of Roughing It in the Bush. She deliberately flagged her famous connections by dedicating it as “a simple Tribute of Affection” to “Agnes Strickland, Author of the ‘Lives of the Queens of England.’ ”

The London reviews were everything that the Moodies had hoped for. The Athenaeum praised the author’s ability to present “the dark side of the emigrant’s life” without being “needlessly lachrymose.” The Literary Gazette admired the author’s patience, noble mind and unaffected outlook and recommended the book for its “great originality and interest,” despite its occasional coarseness. Blackwood’s Magazine carried lengthy extracts, interspersed with lavish praise of the author’s moral courage and good humour in the face of adversity and rude neighbours. The magazine beseeched its female readers to “behold one, gently nurtured as yourselves, cheerfully condescending to rudest toils, unrepiningly enduring hardships you never dreamed of.” Bentley quickly ordered a second printing of Roughing It in the Bush, paid Susanna an additional fifty pounds and asked her to send him more material to publish. He published further editions in 1854 and 1857.

Within weeks of its appearance in England, a pirated edition of Roughing It in the Bush was published in New York. The American publisher, George Putnam, brought out a two-volume version, in which most of the poems were omitted, in his Semi-Monthly Library for Travellers and the Fireside series. The reviewers were equally enthusiastic there. The New York Albion praised the book’s “obvious stamp of truth.” American writers commented with admiration on the author’s bravery in the remote “wilds of Canada,” as though the district Susanna wrote about was in the High Arctic rather than just across Lake Ontario from New York State.

Susanna was buoyed up by her sales. Within a year, Roughing It in the Bush was close to outselling one of the all-time bestsellers in nineteenth-century America: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Chapter 13

Mortification and Madness

I n 1852, the year that Susanna’s Roughing It in the Bush and Catharine’s Canadian Crusoes were published, their sister Agnes Strickland was at the height of her fame in England and grand beyond belief. Whenever Agnes visited her publisher Blackwoods in Edinburgh, “the Scottish papers announce all my arrivals and departures as if I was a Queen myself,” she told Susanna. When she travelled from Reydon to Norwich to make some purchases, the tradesmen begged her to accept without payment any goods she fancied. She was a permanent fixture of gatherings at London’s Kensington Palace, where, she gloated, she met “rooms full of lords and ladies.”

Her elaborate costumes were reported in The Times: on one occasion she wore a “robe of rich Lyons brocade à l’antique, yellow roses, buds, and foliage, on pale silver-coloured ground,” a long lace train and “double skirts of white glacé silk, edged with mauve velvet and covered with a tunic and deep flounce of Honiton point lace.” Fearless of gilding the lily, Agnes wore both a tiara and a plume of white ostrich feathers on her head. The Prime Minister, Benjamin