Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [148]
It was not simply Catharine’s preoccupation with family affairs that kept her long manuscript on plant life unpublished during the 1870s. The more fundamental problem was that Catharine was a nineteenth-century woman writing in an eighteenth-century idiom. Botany was changing; natural history was giving way to scientific technique; laboratory work was replacing nature study. Charles Darwin had rocked the intellectual establishment of the English-speaking world when he published The Origin of Species. Professional botanists now sought evidence of evolutionary change rather than divine intervention when they studied the propagation of plants. Catharine’s writing style—the attractive mix of scientific nomenclature and literary elegance that she had learned from Gilbert White—was increasingly out-of-date. Interest faded in books that reflected sheer love of nature’s bounty and admiration of God’s handiwork. There was no room for female gifted amateurs amongst the academically qualified male scientists in professional associations. In 1897, when D.P. Penhallow, professor of botany at McGill University, published a review of Canadian botany from 1800 to 1895, there was not a single woman mentioned in his list of over one hundred people who had contributed to the subject.
But Catharine, who was as little interested in intellectual fashions as she was in clothing fashions, remained determined to get her manuscript in print. “Nothing is done, my dear,” she remarked to her daughter Katie, “without trying, and if one thing fails I must try another.” Her dog-eared manuscript on plant life would see the light of day during her own lifetime because of her persistence and because, for all its faults, it had its charms.
Chapter 18
A Trip to Stony Lake
S usanna leaned heavily on the arm of her nephew, Percy Strickland, as she hobbled along the dusty road. It was a sultry June morn-ing—the hottest day so far of 1872—and the distance from Westove, Catharine’s cottage, to the Lakefield steamer dock seemed longer than she recalled. She regretted that she had agreed to walk with Percy when she could have been riding with her sister in his horse-drawn buggy. But Percy had put her on her mettle with a careless remark, as he looked at his two stout aunts, that the buggy would “scarcely hold two fairies” like them. Determined not to let her seventy-year-old sister show her up, sixty-eight-year-old Susanna had insisted on walking the mile to the dock situated just behind the little Anglican Church built by her late brother Sam, who had died five years earlier. Now her lace-up black leather boots were pinching her corns. She would have loved to stop and mop the “glow” from her brow.
Once the landing dock was in sight, however, her good humour returned. It had been a pleasant surprise when Percy had arrived at Catharine’s front door that morning to invite his aunts to join a family excursion on the steamer to Stony Lake. Susanna had not seen Stony Lake for years. She vividly recalled the expedition that she and John had made in 1835 by canoe from their log home on Lake Katchewanooka. They had been in Canada less than three years and were