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By Root 1184 0

Stewart in 1851.The following year, she wrote to Susanna of how she longed to visit her, and enjoy “the great comfort to me of seeing you and talking over many matters that I cannot write.” But she was a resilient woman who had learned to escape gnawing anxieties by taking refuge in nature: the huge maple trees, the scampering chipmunks, the delicate saxifrage and white violets that she carefully pressed between layers of cotton in one of Thomas’s books. She also knew what was expected of an English lady: she had seen how her own mother had coped with the loss of her husband when she was forty-six, how she had managed to put a brave face on adversity. Catherine rarely indulged in grumbles. Instead she forced herself to look on the bright side, reminding herself often that God’s grace would protect her. In her daily entries in her journal, Catharine often sounds like the wife of a prosperous gentleman-farmer in Surrey. Gazing out at the distant lake, and watching a cloud of passenger pigeons careen across the mother-of-pearl sky, she noted: “I know of no place more suitable for the residence of an English gentleman’s family. There is hardly a lot of land that might not be converted into a park.”

Catharine’s determination to keep writing was unquenched, despite Agnes’s failure to market her sequel to The Backwoods of Canada. She still wanted to publish a book in England, for the audience with whom she had been most popular when she lived there: children who shared her love of nature’s bounty. She had been mulling over a particular idea for a young people’s novel for nearly ten years. In 1837, she had copied into her journal an advertisement from the Cobourg Star that had sparked the idea. “50 pound REWARD,” read the headline, and in smaller print below: “Lost on Saturday last the 29th of July on the road leading from Bowskill’s mills to Foe’s tavern, near the Rice Lake Plains a child about six years old the daughter of Mr. Thos. Eyre of Hamilton near Cobourg. She wore a blue plaid cotton frock and was without her bonnet. Whoever will return the child to her parents or give such information as may lead to her discovery shall receive the above reward. Thomas Eyre.”

The spectre of children lost in the forest was common among Canada’s early settlers. It was a real threat, when paths were few, forests dense, and children as young as five were sent off to find lost cattle or take a lunch-pail to men working in the bush. Contemporary newspapers were filled with such heartbreaking tales. The story in the Cobourg Star had a happy ending. Mr. Eyre’s daughter (improbably called Jane) was found four days later, after a search involving nearly a thousand people. But there were plenty of other youngsters who were never seen again. Both Catharine and her sister Susanna collected anecdotes of such ghastly occurrences. The nightmare of missing youngsters struck to the core of their maternal beings. Such a prospect, in Susanna’s view, was “more melancholy than the certainty of [the child’s] death.” It also symbolized the deeper anguish of leaving behind familiar scenes and losing oneself in new and unknown territory.

The details of Jane Eyre’s disappearance haunted Catharine’s imagination. She brooded over what it would be like to be the little girl who had wandered away from a picnic and suddenly realized that the sun was sinking and she could no longer hear human voices. She put herself in the place of the mother, screaming her child’s name into the black wall of silent trees and beating her chest with anguish and self-reproach for having allowed the child out of her sight. By the time she arrived at Rice Lake, Catharine had sold two different versions of the story to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and a third to the London annual Home Circle. (Like any professional writer, she had no scruples about recycling her material). By the time the third version appeared in 1849, Catharine was well launched on a full-length novel about children lost on the plains on the south shore of Rice Lake.

Catharine first developed the narrative of what was