Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [119]
Catharine struggled on through the 1850s, sending manuscripts to publishers in England, Scotland and Canada and receiving rejection slips for most of them. The scant rewards she received from her pen demoralized her. Little sympathy was forthcoming from her sisters in England, who were irritated with her constant pleas for help and still nursed their grudges against Susanna. But Susanna was always willing to offer consolation. She knew the uphill struggle that writers in Canada faced. “I can sympathise with you on the rejection of your ms. as Horace Bentley brought back mine,” she wrote in a reassuring note to Catharine. “In these times, people want bread more than books. Authors have but a poor chance of success.” She empathized with her fellow author when Catharine confided her fear that she had “no brains left” and that her writing talents were in decline. By 1858, Susanna herself was in the same fix: her own income from writing had dwindled away to nothing, John’s job was getting more and more difficult, Aggie Fitzgibbon’s husband was sick, and the Moodies had summoned Donald home from McGill. “Poor Aggie is penniless and I have not the means to help her, even with clothes of my own, for I am literally in rags—a misfortune which has seldom happened to me before,” Susanna wrote to Catharine.
But during these years, Susanna had found a diversion from day-today anxiety. She had a new interest in her life, which provided her with the kind of catharsis that, when she was stuck in the bush, writing had once supplied. She and John were caught up in one of the nineteenth century’s more bizarre trends and she was already using the language of the movement. “May better and brighter days be in store for us both,” she wrote to Catharine, when they were both going through a difficult period. “And may we so improve the material present, that it may open the door of the dear spirit land to our weary longing souls.”
Catharine would soon be swept along too in what her sister recognized as a “glorious madness.”
Chapter 15
Rap, Rap, Who’s There?
A s Susanna Moodie sat at her writing desk on a September day in 1855, she heard her Irish servant Jane clattering out of the kitchen to answer a knock at the front door of the Moodies’ house on Bridge Street. A few minutes later, Jane stuck her head into the drawing room and announced that a Miss Fox and her cousin were on the front step and would like a word with Mrs. Moodie. Jane had tried to tell them that Mrs. Moodie was busy right now, but Miss Fox had explained that she was leaving Upper Canada the next day and insisted that Jane at least let Mrs. Moodie know they were here.
Jane was astonished to see how fast Mrs. Moodie, who always discouraged social calls, threw down her quill pen and swept past her to greet her visitors. But Susanna had wanted to meet this afternoon’s visitor for a long time. Kate Fox was one of the famous Fox sisters. She and her sister Maggie had ignited an extraordinary transcontinental flare of interest in “spirit adventures” in 1848 when they gave a public demonstration of their psychic abilities. By 1850, the new practice of spiritualism was already claiming an estimated two million adherents across North America—a fantastic figure considering that the total population was only twenty-five million. The Fox sisters and their followers claimed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead.
The spiritualist “religion” had begun when Maggie, then thirteen, and Kate, twelve, moved with their parents from Upper Canada to northern New York State. Strange sounds began to plague the family at night—raps and knockings for which there were no obvious causes. The noises always occurred around the girls. Neighbours crowded into the Foxes’ cramped parlour to hear the mystery raps. Mrs. Fox insisted that it was a “disembodied spirit” which would answer questions—three raps for “yes,” silence for “no.” Next, the “spirits” that the girls attracted extended their conversational range, thanks to an ingenious