Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [45]
In letters filled with closely-woven handwriting, Susanna recorded her first impressions of British North America.
In her day-to-day existence, Susanna had little time to miss the pleasures of literary London. She was even busier after June 1833, when her second daughter, Agnes, was born. Susanna was far too gritty a woman to let adversity overcome her. Although she downplayed her achievements in the self-deprecating manner of middle-class Englishwomen, Susanna was young and strong and capable. Day to day, she organized her little household, sewed clothes for her family, made sure there was food on the table and took an interest in even those neighbours she came to dislike intensely: “I tried to conceal my blue stockings beneath the long conventional robes of the tamest commonplace.”
Yet all this time, Susanna never stopped thinking of herself as a writer, first and foremost. With baby Aggie in her arms and little Katie crawling around her feet, she would sharpen her goose-quill pen and write long letters to her family in England, just as Catharine was doing thirty-two miles away. Postage, which was paid by the recipient not the sender, was charged by the number of sheets used, so when Susanna had covered one side of the paper, like most correspondents of the time, she would turn it and write across her own writing. Occasionally, she would even turn it to write diagonally across the two layers she had already composed. In some letters, she described their circumstances with grim realism. In response to one outpouring of misery, her sister Agnes replied, “I grieve that you should be the tenants of a comfortless hut and exposed to so many hardships and privations.” At other times, Susanna adopted a more jaunty tone: “We were quite charmed [with] your pretty letter,” Agnes wrote approvingly.
Susanna’s chief preoccupation was to transform her life into literature. On scraps of paper she jotted down sketches of her neighbours and poems that expressed her emotions. Her creativity was fuelled by rage and impatience. Into the edgy, amusing tales of the uncouth settlers amongst whom she found herself she poured her contempt for the illiterate. On other occasions, she would try to capture in verse her impressions and experiences of her new life:
Oh! land of waters, how my spirit tires,
In the dark prison of thy boundless woods …
Though vast the features that compose thy frame,
Turn where we will, the landscape’s still the same.
Susanna was too much of a professional to lock her outpourings away—she wanted to be published. As soon as she arrived in Cobourg, she wrote to editors in York, Montreal and New York, with examples of her verse. Introducing herself as Susanna Strickland to the editor of the Albion, published in New York, she offered two of the poems she had written since she’d arrived in Canada. One described the sound of sleigh bells in winter; the second, more doleful, dealt with an emigrant’s nostalgia for “the music of our native shore.” Susanna made it clear to the editor that, in her opinion, Canada was a living death for writers.
There was, as yet, no Canadian literature, and there were precious few publishers in Upper Canada. Everybody was far too busy struggling to feed their families and cheating their neighbours “to pay much attention to the cultivation of literature.” But she insisted that the demands of family life in a log cabin had not dampened her own poetic inspirations, “which in my own beautiful and beloved land were a never failing source of amusement and delight.”
The Albion’s editor published several poems. Susanna’s morale soared