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would immediately have suggested an introduction to the Earl of Elgin, then Governor General of British North America. If the same opportunity had been offered to Catharine, she would have been thrilled to meet a learned Victorian botanist at a university who might help her identify the flora of the Rice Lake Plains. But Susanna’s choice was characteristically ornery. She chose to visit Toronto’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum, whose inmates during this period were put on show like animals in a zoo. And she chose to write about an individual with no aristocratic or intellectual significance, who was nevertheless of enthralling interest to a student of human nature. She devoted a whole chapter of Life in the Clearings to one of the most notorious women in nineteenth-century Canada, Grace Marks.

Grace was a young Irishwoman who had been convicted, along with a male accomplice, of murdering her employer, a gentleman called Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Susanna first encountered Grace Marks in 1849 at Kingston Penitentiary—a “house of woe and crime,” as she called it. She described with gruesome delight the brutality of the crime in which Grace had been involved. Kinnear (or Captain Kinnaird as Susanna erroneously called him) had been shot at point-blank range, and Nancy Montgomery (“Hannah” in Susanna’s account) was felled with an axe. Grace’s accomplice had wielded the weapons of murder, but Grace was convicted of egging him on. At Kingston, Susanna was struck by the dramatic contrast between the savage murder and Grace’s good looks: “Her complexion is fair, and must, before the touch of hopeless sorrow paled it, have been very brilliant. Her eyes are a bright blue, her hair auburn, and her face would be rather handsome were it not for the long curved chin, which gives, as it always does to most persons who have this facial defect, a cunning, cruel expression.” When the penitentiary’s matron introduced Susanna to Grace Marks, the young convict must have found the intense stare of the self-assured, middle-aged author quite unnerving. For her part, Susanna watched the young woman quail before her penetrating gaze: “Grace Marks glances at you with a sidelong stealthy look; her eye never meets yours, and after a furtive regard, it invariably bends its gaze upon the ground.”

Three years later, on her way home from Niagara Falls, Susanna was shown around Toronto’s Lunatic Asylum and she made a special point of seeking out Grace, who had recently arrived there because “the fearful hauntings of her brain had terminated in madness.” Grace now presented the author with an even more enthralling image. She was “no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment.” Susanna was mesmerized by this vision of monstrous beauty. As a writer, she longed to give narrative shape to what had happened to the young Irishwoman. She invented a few gruesome details to make the crime fit the Victorian taste for melodrama: Kinnear’s body, according to her account, was cut into quarters by the guilty duo. And she decided that Grace’s madness had a redemptive purpose: it was a punishment inflicted by God, who would not let the “unhappy girl” forget the horrible bloodshot eyes of her victim. “When will the long horror of her punishment and remorse be over?” she asked with portentous gravity. “When will she sit at the feet of Jesus, clothed with the unsullied garments of his righteousness, the stain of blood washed from her hand, and her soul redeemed, and pardoned?”

Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings versus the Bush are the two books for which Susanna Moodie is best remembered. However, she published a further four books, all novels, in the early 1850s. In 1853, the same year as Life in the Clearings appeared, Bentley brought out Mark Hurdlestone. The following year, Flora Lyndsay, or Passages in an Eventful Life and Matrimonial Speculations appeared. In 1856, came The Moncktons. Versions of these works had first appeared in the Literary Garland, and