Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [108]
And when those toils rewarding,
Broad lands at length they’ll claim,
They’ll call the new possession
By some familiar name.
Those of Agnes’s friends who read her brother’s book would know that the good major was the owner of “broad lands” on the other side of the ocean. Unlike his sister, who had written about “painful experience in a distant land,” Sam lived a thoroughly civilized life and was a credit to the Strickland name. Sam’s book did well. Bentley’s Miscellany liked the work’s “rough, hearty, genuinely English tone.” The Spectator thought its “Robinson Crusoe character” splendid.
In Belleville, Susanna was shocked by Agnes’s stinging reproaches. “Could I have foreseen her reception of [the dedication],” Susanna wrote to Richard Bentley in London, “thousands would not have induced me to place it there. She has wounded my feelings so severely… that it is to me a perfect eye sore in front of my unfortunate book.” Anger soon took the place of hurt. Susanna was furious that Agnes had dismissed Roughing It in the Bush in such a snobbish fashion. She thought Sam’s book was pretentious and boring. “My brother is dreadfully ridiculed by the Canadian press by adopting that absurd Major.” And she was outraged when Sam, on his return to Canada, boasted of his royalties. Susanna was a fighter, and she thought up a nasty little scheme to sabotage Agnes. She suggested to Richard Bentley that he find an author in England to write a biographical work entitled “The Memoirs of Royal Favourites.” (Such a book would be direct competition for her sister’s biographies. Bentley, who was in the curious position of being both Sam’s and Susanna’s publisher, did not take up the suggestion.)
Susanna was particularly incensed because Agnes, she suspected, had exerted her influence over many of the London reviewers. “Hers is a ready and a clever pen,” she wrote to Bentley. “It is more than probable, that to her, both my brother and I, are indebted, he for the good, I for the bad reviews of our respective works.” Most of the reviews of Roughing It in the .Bush in London’s influential literary papers were in fact very positive. But this was the first time since 1830, when Susanna had published her lengthy poem “Enthusiasm,” that, instead of turning out formulaic pap, she had poured out her own heart and soul to her readers in England, and she was abnormally sensitive to criticism. The most negative London review was in the Observer, which took exception to Susanna’s anti-Irish bias: “She describes the Irish emigrants in terms which a reflective writer would scarcely apply to a pack of hounds—as ‘filthy beings sullying the purity of the air and water (of Grosse Ile)’… ‘vicious, uneducated barbarians, far behind the wild man (Indian savage) in delicacy of feeling and natural courtesy.’” The reviewer pointed out that it was thanks to Susanna’s Irish servants, particularly John Monaghan and Jenny, that the Moodies survived the bush. However, the reviewer added that Roughing It in the Bush was “one of the most valuable books hitherto published on that ever-novel, and always interesting subject, the customs and manners of large classes of people.”
For Susanna, ten good reviews could not heal the hurt of one snarky comment. She was particularly upset because the London Observer’s review was reprinted in the Montreal Pilot in March 1852. Moreover, once copies of Roughing