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By Root 1198 0

It in the Bush started to arrive in Canada, Susanna found she had touched sensitive nerves in a young and self-conscious literary community, in which writers had first-hand knowledge of the bush. Charles Lindsey, editor of the Examiner and son-in-law of William Lyon Mackenzie, went after her for putting on airs. He called her “An ape of the aristocracy. Too poor to lie on a sofa and too proud to work for her bread.” Such a glib quip was hardly fair, and Susanna pretended to laugh it off. “I can bear the castigation,” she assured friends. Another reviewer in the United Empire accused her of penning “an unfaithful portrait of a settler’s life”; she had either “greatly overrated her sufferings in the bush, or …very bad management must have occasioned them.” This reviewer pointed out that, by colonial standards, the Moodies were well off: they had arrived in Canada with enough money to buy a cleared farm; they had received a handsome legacy; and they had benefited from both John’s commission and then his salary as a captain in the militia. All these reviews, and their disparaging comments, left a nasty taste in Susanna’s mouth. She convinced herself that Canadians hated her. “Will they ever forgive me for writing Roughing It?” she wrote Bentley. “They know that it was the truth, but have I not been a mark for every vulgar editor of a village journal, through the length and breadth of the land to hurl a stone at, and point out as the enemy of Canada?”

Good reviews in three Toronto newspapers—the Globe, the British Colonist, and the Anglo-American Magazine—did not calm her down or alter her view that Canadians were “vindictive, treacherous and dishonest. They always impute to your words and actions the worst motives, and no abuse is too coarse to express in their public journals.” To outsiders, Susanna seemed cool and self-possessed, but in private she could be thin-skinned and unsure of herself. The bad reviews and Agnes’s anger triggered all the insecurities of her childhood, when she had felt unloved by her father and sisters. As usual, she now turned to John for support, and as usual, John was there for her. Whatever the trials of living in Canada, Susanna’s happy marriage was a source of strength. She acknowledged this in a touching letter to her publisher: “As a wife and mother, I have been so blessed, that one day spent in the company of my dear white-haired husband, is worth all the joys and sorrows of those sad years of home.”

Blessed as a wife she might be. But she was not so blessed as a mother. Just when Susanna was feeling most vulnerable, she was finding that she could not look to her own children for much support.

The first of the Moodie offspring to cause problems was Agnes, the delicate and willful second daughter. Agnes and Susanna had had a difficult relationship since Agnes was six, when she was farmed out to live with Mary Hague in Peterborough during Susanna’s final months in the bush. When the Moodies were at last ready to move to Belleville, Mary had not wanted to give the little girl back. She and Aggie adored each other, and Aggie had screamed resentfully when she was reunited with her own family. Susanna described Agnes as “lively and volatile” (which makes her sound suspiciously like Susanna herself) and felt that the Hagues, however well-meaning, had spoiled Agnes. She criticized her daughter for being selfish and obsessed with her own good looks.

The constant fault-finding drove Agnes into the arms of her beau, a charming Toronto lawyer named Charles Fitzgibbon, whom she insisted on marrying in 1850 when she was only seventeen. Charlie and Agnes made a handsome pair: she was the daughter of a famous author and he was the son of Colonel James Fitzgibbon, a hero of both the War of 1812 and the Rebellion of 1837. Susanna kept telling her daughter that her precious Charlie was a gambler who would throw all his money away, but Aggie ignored her and was pregnant soon after the wedding. Susanna foresaw trouble.

Susanna got on better with her eldest daughter. Katie was a sensible, although rather humourless