Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [98]
Wilson didn’t care about ornery conduct or small-town gossip: he wanted the famous Mrs. Moodie. But Susanna, though flattered by his attention, was too hard-headed to contribute to publications that didn’t pay. She didn’t trust Wilson: he was glib, and as one of her friends suggested, too driven by “a sordid love of the ‘Dimes and Dollars.’” Susanna felt herself sufficiently established as a writer to require a certain deference. Wilson now made her an interesting offer. He told her how delighted he would be to publish a periodical edited by her. It would be cheap enough for working Canadians to afford, so that it might have a wide circulation.
Joseph Wilson was not the only entrepreneur eager to give uncouth Upper Canada some literary polish. Magazines that included Canadian material for Canadian readers, rather than reprinted material from British annuals, were multiplying. Most of them (then as now) were short-lived. As Susanna grumbled, they folded because they had to compete with American monthlies “got up in the first style, handsomely illustrated, and composed of the best articles, selected from European and American magazines [and] sold at such a low rate, that one or other is to be found in almost every decent home in the province.” But a handful of Canadian writers were at last beginning to produce home-grown material. Whenever Susanna or Catharine received an issue of John Lovell’s Literary Garland, they saw not only their own contributions but also steel engravings of the St. Lawrence River or the port of Montreal. They read pieces by the likes of John Richardson, Charles Sangster and Rosanna Leprohon. These writers slotted accounts of life in the colony into the mélange of hack escapist fantasies about fashionable aristocrats in romantic European castles that were still the mainstay of nineteenth-century periodicals. Richardson’s contributions included an article about Indians in Upper Canada. Charles Sangster’s poetry dealt with the familiar St. Lawrence landscape. Rosanna Leprohon portrayed life amongst the Hurons, and the trials of a destitute immigrant.
The letters that Susanna and Catharine wrote home rarely mentioned the growing literary self-consciousness of British North America: their letters covered news of harvests, children and friends. Yet both women organized their lives very differently from any of their neighbours. They structured their days, and their family duties, around what had become their main occupation: the composition of poems, sketches and stories for publication. They saw themselves as professional writers, earning money on which their families’ welfare depended. A few other educated female immigrants kept journals of their daily lives: on Sturgeon Lake, just north of Peterborough, Ann Langton sat down each evening to record the comings and goings at her brother’s farm. But none shared what critic and biographer Michael Peterman has called the Strickland sisters’ “developed sense of literary self and attentiveness to audience.” Other women didn’t have the Stricklands’ ruthless (or obsessive) self-discipline, which enabled them to turn their backs on domestic tasks and pick up a quill pen. It often felt like a useless occupation. Susanna regretfully noted, “The low esteem in which all literary labor is held in this country renders it every thing but a profitable employment.” Yet the faint outlines of a new culture were starting to appear, and the Strickland sisters were both in its vanguard.
On that blustery spring day in 1847, Susanna was on her way to tell Wilson that she would accept his invitation to edit a publication, but only on her own terms. It was nearly ten years since Susanna had written from their farm on Lake Katchewanooka to John, while he was serving as paymaster, suggesting that they might co-edit