Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [4]
In all these books, the two women are iconic and elusive. Twentieth-century writers have deduced their personalities from their published works. I wondered, as any writer must: what were the women behind the authorial voices really like? When Susanna and Catharine were not carefully shaping their own images for their readers, how did they behave? What were their private thoughts and feelings? How much did the blood relationship between these two women mean to each of them? How did they relate to their husbands and children, and to the sisters they had left behind in England?
I found the answers to these questions in three recently published volumes of their personal papers held in various archives (principally in the National Archives of Canada and the National Library). In the unvarnished prose of old journals and yellowing letters, a different picture of each sister emerges. I learned of Susanna’s quiet competence, even as she put on paper her sense of helplessness in the woods. I read about the disasters and family trials behind the brave face Catharine always wore. I realized how much the sisters relied on one another, as a link with the Old Country and as a source of support for each other’s creative efforts. I understood the importance to Catharine and Susanna of a third sister, the intimidating Agnes Strickland, in England. The sisters came alive for me, as flesh-and-blood women at the centres of their families. There is much more to both of them than they ever allowed their own readers to know.
Most of all, I began to understand the stamina, talent and determination that allowed two English ladies to overcome the hardships of pioneer life and leave a powerful legacy to Canadian culture. They never achieved their hopes of joining the Canadian land-owning cream, but over the past 150 years, they have successfully forced themselves to the top of our literary milk-pot.
Sisters in the Wilderness
Prelude
February 1834
T all, dense pine trees loomed over the Moodies, blocking any glimpse of the night sky, as they wearily clambered down from the heavy, horse-drawn sleigh. Susanna, John and their two little girls were exhausted, hungry and chilled to the bone. For eighteen hours they had lurched across packed snow and frozen swamp and through thick, silent forest. Now they had finally arrived at the home of Susanna’s sister Catharine Parr Traill and her husband Thomas, just north of the little Upper Canadian town of Peterborough. Golden light flooded out of the log cabin’s open door: Susanna stumbled towards its promise of warmth and shelter—and reunion with her beloved sister.
Was it really less than two years since the sisters had last seen each other? It felt like half a lifetime. Back then, the two young women had been rising stars in the lively literary world of Regency London. They had more than enough talent and education to become serious writers: only the straitened circumstances of their own family, and their husbands’ poor prospects, had held them back. Persuaded by their husbands that they would have a better future in the colonies, they had said goodbye to each other on the pebble beach of Southwold, in Suffolk. Then each couple had made their own way across the Atlantic, towards Upper Canada, for a new life in a New World.
So far, however, the New World had proved more hostile than they had ever imagined. As Susanna huddled in the sleigh throughout that long February day, she wondered whether she would ever be able to carve a comfortable