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man called Ashton Warner from St. Vincent, and a forty-year-old woman, Mary Prince, from Bermuda. Mary, now working in the Pringle household, dictated “a recital of revolting cruelty” to the impressionable young Susanna, who carefully wrote down and shaped the narrative of exploitation. Susanna downplayed the project’s importance in a letter to a friend: “It is a pathetic little history and is now printing in the form of a pamphlet to be laid before the Houses of Parliament. Of course my name does not appear.” But the impressionable twenty-seven-year-old was gripped by Mary’s account of physical and sexual brutalities at the hands of her masters. She had seen with her own eyes the appalling crisscross of scars, evidence of repeated lashings, on the older woman’s back. Mary Prince was a tough, outspoken survivor, but her experiences as a malnourished, poor, powerless woman in a distant British colony fed Susanna’s fascination with the darker side of human existence. When Susanna subsequently published Ashton Warner’s story, she reproached her fellow countrymen with the “gross injustice and awful criminality of a free nation suffering such an abomination as negro slavery to exist in her dominions.”

Susanna’s letters reveal how much she enjoyed mingling with publishers, essayists and writers when they congregated in the Pringles’ London drawing room. She was flattered when the intelligentsia made a fuss of her, assuring James Bird with blatantly false modesty, “I am almost sick of flattering encomiums on my genius. How these men in London do talk. I learn daily to laugh at their fine love speeches.” She was eager for friendship with other “bluestockings,” as women writers were often called. Most of all, the ambition to be a much-published, well-known author—a path on which her sister Agnes was already launched—began to burn in her with a frightening fierceness. Although the Strickland girls were raised to respect intellectual achievement, they were also brought up to be docile wives to whomever they might marry. Susanna was both intoxicated and embarrassed by her hunger for fame—a hunger, she worried, that was “not only a weak but a criminal passion.” Her angst cannot have been helped by the fact that she was now over twenty-five and, like all her sisters, seemed fated for spinsterhood.

Rivalry between Agnes and Susanna continued to seethe as Susanna began to catch up with her sister’s success. The two women managed a temporary truce in 1830 when they co-produced a small pamphlet entitled Patriotic Songs, including eight poems, four by each sister, that celebrated England and the monarchy. King William IV was so impressed that he called its authors “an ornament to our country.” And Catharine was relieved to see Agnes and Susanna on better terms. “Could I tell you the joy that fills my heart at the reunion of two sisters, you would rejoice,” wrote the family peacemaker to “kindest and most affectionate Susy.” “May no worldly consideration, no prejudice, no contradiction of opinion on indifferent subjects ever disturb your love.”

Then, in May 1830, Lieutenant John Dunbar Moodie, an exuberant and cheerful thirty-three-year-old Scot who had just returned from South Africa to look for a wife, turned up at the home of his old friend Thomas Pringle. Soon, he and Susanna were taking walks together on Hampstead Heath, sharing their love of music and reading aloud to each other. Within two months of John’s arrival, Susanna’s interest in theological debate had been overtaken by her enthusiasm for the dashing lieutenant. In the words of her sister Catharine, she had “become a convert to Lieutenant Dunbar Moodie.” And John Moodie was petitioning Mrs. Thomas Strickland for her youngest daughter’s hand in marriage.

Chapter 3

Sweet Dreams

J ohn Dunbar Moodie marched into Susanna Strickland’s life with the verve of a fife-and-drum band. He appeared to offer everything Susanna wanted in a lover. He could match her emotional intensity, and (like her sister Catharine) he could lift her spirits with his infectious optimism and