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By Root 1197 0

on the little ones as though you heard it not,” Catharine told Annie. “It is just her way you know.”) Susanna objected to the number of people continually trooping through the house, and the consequent expense. (“Aunt has only a few dollars in the Bank,” she wrote to her daughter Katie Vickers. “But she will entertain … ”) Sarah Gwillym, on the other side of the Atlantic, got the impression that the household was messy and disorganized. When an envelope arrived in England with unfinished scraps of two letters from Catharine, Sarah wrote back: “Tell her with my love that her last letters were rather disappointing….I suppose that as she seemed to have more than a houseful of people with her that she had more on her hands than she could well get through, poor dear, though I suppose that in Canada all visitors help till all the duties are done.”

Susanna spent more and more of her time in her bedroom, reading and going through old papers rather than joining the endless family gatherings in the drawing room downstairs. She refused to join Catharine for overnight visits to relatives’ houses. She had been asked by a collector for a copy of her famous sister Agnes Strickland’s autograph, and as she searched through a pile of old letters, she was often moved to tears. “I had no idea that I had so many, and such long letters from Agnes, and until my unlucky book was published, so full of affection,” she told Katie Vickers, adding triumphantly, “Mrs. Traill seemed quite astonished that Agnes had written such letters to me!” As the months went by, Susanna’s thoughts of Agnes became increasingly fond and she barely remembered how Agnes’s reaction to Roughing It in the Bush had stung her.

In 1872, Susanna and Catharine were disturbed to hear that Agnes, now seventy-six, had suffered a serious fall on the stairs of a friend’s house and broken her leg. Jane Strickland wrote from Southwold that the accident had been a prelude to serious bronchial problems for Agnes: “the attack was both paralytic and apoplectic, but you must not name it to her or let any of her relatives in Canada mention it as that would make her unhappy.” Agnes’s health slowly collapsed, and she died in July 1874. A few weeks later, her brother Thomas Strickland passed away.

Susanna expressed quite as much grief as Catharine at Agnes’s death. She was quick to correct various errors made in an obituary that appeared in the Toronto Globe, and to add a eulogy of her own: “An affectionate, loving daughter, a faithful sister and friend, kind and benevolent to the poor, and possessing warm sympathies for the sick and suffering; she never let the adulation of the world interfere with the blessed domestic charities.”

But indomitable Agnes had never forgiven her youngest sister for that “unlucky book.” At her death, she was not going to give Susanna the pleasure of believing that she could rival Catharine as the family favourite. Susanna must have been stunned when, a few weeks later, she heard the contents of Agnes’s will. Agnes left the copyright to her Lives of the Queens of England, still a bestseller in Victorian England, jointly to Catharine Parr Traill and Percy Strickland. (Her sister Elizabeth was furious, since by rights half belonged to her; however, Elizabeth died the following year). There was no specific bequest for Susanna. Agnes did not leave her sister even a single keepsake from Reydon, “which was rather mean I must say,” Catharine acknowledged.

In the fall of 1874, a large box arrived in Lakefield from Sarah Gwillym. It contained a treasure-trove: the splendid wardrobe in which Agnes had made her entrances at various royal, noble and civic occasions. Catharine pulled out black silk and brocade gowns, jet and gold jewellery, pearl-encrusted collars and intricate lace flounces, whalebone corsets and horsehair petticoats, muslin underskirts and voluminous velvet cloaks, elaborately decorated bonnets, shawls and gloves. “It is so many years ago since I looked upon articles so rich and costly,” she marvelled. Most articles were distributed amongst various granddaughters