Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [112]
She was right: her London reviews were increasingly crabby. One went so far as to say that the story and characters in The Moncktons “appear to have been brought out of a dusty toy-box.” The comment unnerved Susanna, who had been struggling to stay abreast of literary fashions. Sometimes she and John borrowed from their wealthier friends the latest works by British authors such as Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson and Macaulay, or American authors such as Longfellow and Emerson; sometimes Bentley sent them some titles. And there were always Mr. Duff and Mr. Harrison, the two booksellers on Belleville’s Front Street, who had regular shipments from London and New York. But British fiction in the mid-nineteenth century reflected a society entirely foreign to someone who had left Britain before Victoria ascended the throne. By mid-century, British writers were tracking a society in flux, with tension between town and country and between rich and poor. The fiction teemed with types and plots unknown to Regency era writers: nouveau riche factory owners, embattled aristocrats, scheming politicians, ambitious women and the pathetic victims of industrialization. The great Victorian novels were written with an intellectual slant very different from that of Susanna’s flowery tales, featuring stock heroes and fainting ladies. Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House and Thackeray’s Pendennis and Vanity Fair (all of which Susanna read hot off the press) included not only the social comedy familiar from Jane Austen’s novels but also a steady flow of ironic and moral comment. Susanna was happy enough to make such comments in her non-fiction work (a little too happy, if truth be told: parts of Life in the Clearings read like a church tract), but she had neither the skill nor the confidence to incorporate her own ideas into the conventional plots of her fictional works.
By the time that The Moncktons appeared, Susanna felt less confidence in herself as a writer than she had felt since she’d arrived in Canada. She didn’t belong anywhere. English critics regarded her work as passé; Canadians, she felt, had rejected her. She was an outsider in both her native and her adopted lands, and she was angered by what she perceived as non-stop criticism. Only John could always cheer her up and make her feel both talented and lovable. When they were parted, Susanna was unsettled and miserable. John took a trip into the United States in 1856, and Susanna wrote to Catharine: “Time lengthens into ages while he is away. Will age never diminish my love for this man … he is as dear to me after five and twenty years of intercourse as he was when we first met. The kind darling sent me a beautiful gold locket and chain containing a capital likeness of himself. You would laugh to see me regarding that white bearded face with the devotion of old times. The old romance of my nature is not quite dead. The poetry of life still lingers about my heart.”
Despite sales in the United States, Susanna’s writing income continued to shrink. Susanna could expect no help from home. “I never hear from Reydon now,” she told her publisher. “They have ignored me and my books.” The rift with Agnes was still not mended, and the only news that Susanna got was via Catharine.
Years later, after Agnes’s death in 1874, Susanna’s and Catharine’s sister Sarah—the only non-author among the six Strickland sisters—wrote to Susanna’s daughter Katie Vickers to explain the lengthy gap in correspondence during the 1850s between Susanna and her English sisters. “The publication of that disgusting book Roughing