Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [152]
Robert Moodie, Susanna’s beloved youngest child, with his wife Nellie and one of their seven children.
Susanna’s health problems weren’t helped by two worries. She wanted to continue her literary career—in particular, she was eager to publish some of her husband’s work. But without John’s guidance, her writing and editing skills deserted her. She agreed to let George Maclean Rose, of the Toronto publishing house Hunter, Rose and Company, bring out a new edition of her own Roughing It in the Bush, but she couldn’t even draft an updated introduction. “You must help me with matter for the Canadian preface,” she implored Katie Vickers. “I forget all the subjects dear John told me to write about on the present state and prospects of Canada.” It took her months to draft an introductory chapter in which she defended herself against her critics, celebrated the progress of the previous forty years and insisted that “some of the happiest years of my life” had been spent in the colony.
The second source of stress for Susanna was her family. Susanna’s relations with her eldest four children continued to deteriorate. As adults, both Katie and Agnes found their mother exasperating. When she stayed with them, she was demanding and critical. Susanna was a little too free with her opinions on child-raising and sketch-writing (“I think her publishing has not been profitable,” she wrote to her sister Catharine, about Agnes Chamberlin, “but she would not listen to my advice”). Susanna’s devotion to her husband had been particularly hard for the two boys, Dunbar and Donald, who always felt second-best. In 1866, to his mother’s consternation, shiftless Donald had married Julia Russell, the sister of Dunbar’s wife Eliza. Susanna had now decided that she didn’t like either of the two Jamaican sisters, and she could never resist being catty about them in her letters to Catharine (“It is only that horrid woman,” she told her sister, that prevented Donald from writing home). By the 1870s, both men were living as far away from their mother as they could afford on very limited means. Dunbar was in Colorado, in an experimental agricultural community. Donald was an alcoholic, who was constantly scrounging money from relatives and whose wife eventually left him. Neither ever visited their widowed mother, although she always kept in touch with both of them.
Robert Moodie was more sympathetic to his mother than his elder brothers and sisters. But he was struggling with health and financial problems of his own, which worried Susanna. “The dear kind fellow has a shocking cough,” Susanna wrote to Catharine, “and is very thin and delicate.” As though he did not have tribulations enough, an additional blow struck in 1871. His wife Nellie was overcome with what Susanna described as “raving madness.” Today, Nellie would be diagnosed as suffering from postnatal depression: she had just given birth to her fourth child, and was subject to alternating fits of weeping and rage. But there was no clear diagnosis one hundred years ago. Instead, she was committed to the grim wards of Toronto’s Lunatic Asylum, whose “raving maniacs” (including the murderess Grace Marks) Susanna had visited twenty years earlier. Robert was left with four young children, an unpleasant mother-in-law and bills for both