Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [172]
This book would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the Canada Council and the Arts Committee of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton. I am grateful to both for their continued support of Canadian writers.
Sources
Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are themselves the main sources for this book. Thanks to the New Canadian Library imprint of McClelland and Stewart, Catharine’s The Backwoods of Canada and Susanna’s Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings versus the Bush are still in print. The University of Ottawa Press has recently issued a collection of Susanna’s short narratives, under the title Voyages (1991, edited by John Thurston), and a collection of Catharine’s sketches, under the title Forest and Other Gleanings (1994, edited by Michael A. Peterman and Carl Ballstadt). Carleton University Press has reissued Catharine’s novel Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains (1986, edited by Rupert Schieder). I found original copies of all the other books that the sisters wrote in Canada in the Parliamentary Library and the National Library of Canada.
The sisters’ published works tell only half the story. For their personal letters I relied heavily on three volumes of their correspondence, published by the University of Toronto Press and edited by Professor Carl Ballstadt of McMaster University, Professor Elizabeth Hopkins of York University and Professor Michael A. Peterman of Trent University. The volumes are Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime (1985), Letters of Love and Duty, The Correspondence of Susanna and John Moodie (1993) and I Bless You in My Heart, Selected Correspondence of Catharine Parr Traill (1996). I used the Traill Family Collection in the National Archives of Canada, and the Patrick Hamilton Ewing Collection in the National Library of Canada, for additional letters from Catharine, and for letters from other members of the Strickland, Moodie and Traill families.
Given the importance of the Strickland sisters for students of both Canadian history and Canadian literature, there have been surprisingly few attempts to describe their lives in nineteenth-century Canada. The best, Audrey Y. Morris’s The Gentle Pioneers, appeared in 1966. Other useful biographical assessments of Catharine and Susanna are G.H. Needler’s Otonabee Pioneers, The Story of the Stewarts, the Stricklands, the Traills and the Moodies (1953); Clara Thomas’s essay on “The Strickland Sisters” in The Clear Spirit, edited by Mary Quayle Innis (Toronto, 1966); Marian Fowler’s The Embroidered Tent (1982). Michael Peterman’s Susanna Moodie: A Life (1999) elegantly traces the links between Susanna’s books and her life. Sara Eaton’s Lady of the Backwoods (1969) is a cheerful account for young readers of Catharine’s life.
There are two biographies of the formidable Agnes Strickland. The first is her sister Jane’s hagiography, published in 1887. The second is Una Pope-Hennessy’s Agnes Strickland, Biographer of the Queens of England (1940).
PRELUDE
Elizabeth Thompson discussed the Strickland sisters’ influence on subsequent writers in The Pioneer Woman, A Canadian Character Type (1991). Michael Peterman discussed the way subsequent writers have treated Susanna in This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1996).
CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3
Details of the Strickland family in England come from a variety of sources. They include Catharine’s reminiscences published in her book Pearls and Pebbles (1894); an interview with Susanna Moodie that I found in an 1884 issue of the Toronto Globe, in the Belleville Public Library;