Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [174]
CHAPTER 11
Three local historians supplied me with a wealth of wonderful detail about the residents of the Rice Lake area during the last century. Gore’s Landing and the Rice Lake Plains (1986) by N. Martin, C. Milne and D. McGillis brought home to me the spirit and eccentricity of so many early settlers. Rupert Schieder’s introduction to the Carleton University Press edition of Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1986) and Michael Peterman’s introduction to the Carleton University Press edition of Catharine’s The Backwoods of Canada (1997) covered Catharine’s experience with publishers, and the receptions accorded her books.
The most useful source on the slow and tortured development of the Canadian publishing industry is George L. Parker’s The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada (1985). I also looked at Royal A. Gettman’s A Victorian Publisher, A Study of the Bentley Papers (1960) and H. Pearson Gunday’s Book Publishing and Publishers in Canada before 1900 (1965).
CHAPTER 12
This chapter would have been impossible without a thoughtful and exhaustive thesis by Klay Dyer, entitled “A Periodical for the People, Mrs. Moodie and The Victoria Magazine” (unpublished thesis presented at the University of Ottawa, 1992). It shaped all my reactions when I read the original Victoria Magazine, now reprinted by the University of British Columbia Press.
Since Roughing It in the Bush is by far the best-known book by Susanna, it has repeatedly been put under the academic microscope. Among the most helpful analyses are two by Michael Peterman: “Roughing It in the Bush as Autobiography,” in Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature, edited by K.P. Stich (1988); and This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1996). A collection of essays which cast a new light on many aspects of Canadian women’s writing, and which I found helpful and provocative, was Re(dis)covering our Foremothers, edited by Lorraine McMullen (1990). I learned a lot from Alec Lucas’s contribution, “The Function of the Sketches in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush,” and Bina Freiwald’s “‘The tongue of woman’: The Language of the Self in Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush.”
CHAPTERS 13 AND 14
Most of the information in these chapters is contained in the exchange of letters between the Strickland sisters on each side of the Atlantic, and in Pope-Hennessy’s biography of Agnes Strickland. Samuel Strickland’s pioneer memoir, Twenty-seven years in Canada West, was first published in 1853, and was reprinted in 1970 by Hurtig.
CHAPTER 15
Most of the Moodie material in this chapter comes from Susanna’s letters, and from “‘A Glorious Madness,’ Susanna Moodie and the Spiritualist Movement” by Carl Ballstadt, Michael Peterman and Elizabeth Hopkins (Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 17,No. 4, Winter 1982-83). The nineteenth-century fascination with spiritualism has often been ignored by serious historians, while attracting the attention of twentieth-century believers. One of the best and most dispassionate accounts of the Fox sisters’ activities appears in The Spiritualists, The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century by Ruth Brandon (1983). I also looked at Mediums and Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals by Howard Kerr (1972), and Geoffrey Nelson’s Spiritualism and Society (1969). For information about Victoria Woodhull, I read Barbara Goldsmith’s Other Powers, The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1998) and Mary Gabriel’s Notorious Victoria (1998). Ramsay Cook’s The Regenerators, Social Criticism in Late Victorian