Sisters in the Wilderness Read online

  Praise for Sisters in the Wilderness

  National Bestseller

  Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award 2000 for the Non-Fiction Book of the Year

  Winner of the 1999 Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History

  Shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award

  A Globe 100 Book of 1999

  “Everyone knows the stories of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, but not until this double biography has so much been revealed about the sisters who founded a literary tradition in Canada.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Richly detailed and wonderfully written … Gray [exhibits] an uncommon ability to tell a compelling story … evocative … superb …”

  —The London Free Press

  “Sisters in the Wilderness is a masterly biography.… [A] particularly moving … portrait of pioneer life: the raw landscape, the endless journeys, the hazards of travel, the terrors of lonely settlements.”

  —Calgary Herald/Ottawa Citizen

  “A captivating double biography.”

  —Financial Times

  “Simply one of the most delightful books you’ll ever read. What’s more, you don’t have to be a Canadian to enjoy it.”

  —The Canada Post

  “A fine and astringent book … what distinguishes this book is—a most enviable quality in any biography—a superb trustworthiness. That trust is born out of intelligence and sympathy alike.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “Charlotte Gray’s exciting new biography, the beautifully-illustrated Sisters in the Wilderness, brings these women to life beyond their books.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “A major contribution … Gray is equally forthcoming with detail about life in the bush and towns of 19th century Canada…. I was thoroughly engrossed…. Sisters is a keeper that will be useful in many ways for a long time to come.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Many delights [in] this superb biography.”

  —Quill & Quire, starred review

  “In Charlotte Gray’s wonderful new biography, [the sisters] are brought to life as two remarkable women whose close relationship never faltered throughout their long and often challenging lives…. Gray draws a compelling and insightful picture of these two very different women and the time in which they lived…. With meticulous research and an immensely readable style, Gray chronicles the sisters’ never-ending struggles and their eventual rise to literary fame…”

  —National Post

  “Gray has produced a fascinating examination of two of this country’s seminal woods-and-prairies writers … [an] entertaining and honest picture of two plucky gentlewomen’s thrashings in the bush.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Hats off to Gray for providing a vehicle that allows us to see these literary revolutionaries in a new, remarkably humanistic light.”

  —The Calgary Straight

  “Vivid…. Gray peels away the hoary stereotypes to reveal the tumultuous lives of two sisters whose prolific writings added immensely to cultural life in the young colony. Sisters in the Wilderness is a meticulously researched historical account graced with the narrative drive, elegant prose and complex characters of an accomplished novel…. Gray’s biography is a winning remedy for the oversights of history.”

  —Maclean’s

  “Gray’s fascinating biography … offers us an old-fashioned adventure story for girls, a tribute to the moxie of two remarkable women.… Gray memorably contrasts [their] ordeals …”

  —Telegraph-Journal (Saint John, NB)

  “Gray has done a commendable job presenting two most interesting lives.”

  —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

  “Charlotte Gray is a superb storyteller and that is what this country desperately needs now that our history has been so shamefully ignored by our educational system.”

  —Pierre Berton

  PENGUIN CANADA

  SISTERS IN THE WILDERNESS

  CHARLOTTE GRAY is one of Canada’s best known writers and biographers, and the award-winning author of several bestsellers, including Reluctant Genius: The Passions and Inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King. An adjunct research professor in the department of history at Carleton University, Gray sits on the boards of both the Dominion Institute and the Canadian National History Society. She and her husband live in Ottawa.

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1999

  Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000

  Published in this edition, 2008

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Charlotte Gray, 1999

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

  94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Gray, Charlotte, 1948–

  Sisters in the wilderness : the lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill / Charlotte Gray.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-14-316836-2

  1. Moodie, Susanna, 1803–1885. 2. Traill, Catherine Parr, 1802–1899. 3. Frontier and pioneer life—Ontario. 4. Women authors, Canadian (English)—19th century—Biography. 5. Women authors, Canadian (English)—Ontario—Biography. I. Title.

  FC3067.2.G729 2008

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  This book is for my parents, Robert and Elizabeth Gray, with love.

  It is also in affectionate memory of my father-in-law

  Dr. Reginald Anderson (1910–1998).

  Contents


  Preface

  Prelude: February 1834

  Chapter 1: New Beginnings

  Chapter 2: “The Scribbling Fever”

  Chapter 3: Sweet Dreams

  Chapter 4: Flapping Sails

  Chapter 5: Land of Stumps

  Chapter 6: “Yankee Savages”

  Chapter 7: “Halcyon Days in the Bush”

  Chapter 8: “A Little Red-Haired Baboon”

  Chapter 9: A Call to Arms

  Chapter 10: Belligerent Belleville

  Chapter 11: Barefoot Crusoes

  Chapter 12: The Secrets of the Prison House

  Chapter 13: Mortification and Madness

  Chapter 14: Good Advice

  Chapter 15: Rap, Rap, Who’s There?

  Chapter 16: Tottering Slowly On

  Chapter 17: “A Wail for the Forest”

  Chapter 18: A Trip to Stony Lake

  Chapter 19: Apotheosis in Ottawa

  Chapter 20: The Oldest Living Author in Her Majesty’s Dominion

  Postscript

  Family Trees:

  Thomas and Elizabeth Strickland

  John and Susanna Moodie

  Thomas and Catharine Parr Traill

  Sam Strickland

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Picture Credits

  Index

  Maps:

  Suffolk

  British North America

  Rice Lake and Douro Township

  Belleville

  Preface

  “Iwonder,” wrote Charles Dickens in the 1830s, “if I went to a new colony with my head, hands, legs and health, I should force myself to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream! … Upon my word, I believe I should.”

  In the early nineteenth century, it was tempting for members of the British gentry to share Dickens’s belief as they boarded the ships to Canada. Surely, with their brains, education and manners, they would effortlessly rise to the top of the colonial society! The sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, and their husbands John Moodie and Thomas Traill, assumed this as they set sail across the Atlantic. Most of their fellow immigrants were so poor, so ignorant. The Traills and Moodies persuaded themselves that they would form the land-owning cream of Upper Canada.

  They were terribly wrong. The two husbands lacked the physical skills and abilities required to be pioneers in a hostile frontier landscape. The two wives, tougher and more competent than their husbands, met challenges far greater than anything they would have known living in genteel poverty in the Old Country. The four sisters they had left behind in England could not begin to imagine the exhausting and harrowing experiences of women in the Canadian bush. Susanna and Catharine faced childbirth alone in the woods and dealt with the threat of forest fires, wild animals, frostbite and starvation.

  Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill differed from almost all the other middle-class women who arrived in British North America in the early nineteenth century in one respect: by the time they arrived in Canada, both were published writers, with an intellectual need to capture their experiences in the written word. Back in England, the two sisters had published poetry, romantic fiction and children’s stories that fit into the Regency tradition of women’s writing. Most of it was insipid and conventional. In Canada, while they evolved from ingenuous British emigrants to sturdy Canadian immigrants, they were also finding new voices. Despite the incredibly hard work of surviving and raising families in the raw new colony, they carved out time each day to write themselves into visibility.

  I read Roughing It in the Bush, Susanna’s best known book, soon after I myself arrived in Canada. Her reactions and observations resonated with me, although 150 years had elapsed between our transatlantic crossings. I identified with her homesickness, and her inability to understand her Yankee neighbours. Like her, I found little charm in an Ontario landscape that was a bleak contrast to the cosy English countryside. Years later, I discovered Catharine Parr Traill while researching Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King. Her book The Backwoods of Canada provided telling details about life in the nineteenth-century colony. I was captivated by Catharine’s sunny temperament. Her unpretentious pragmatism was a characteristic that, after fifteen years of friendships with Canadian women, I saw as a dominant Canadian trait.

  The sisters’ ability to speak to contemporary readers helps explain Catharine’s and Susanna’s powerful hold on the contemporary Canadian imagination. Their names and books have endured not simply because there are so few records of domestic life in the early years of Upper Canada, but because the personality of each sister reverberates through her best works. Over the course of their long lives, the two sisters laid the foundation of a literary tradition that still endures in Canada: the pioneer woman who displays extraordinary courage, resourcefulness and humour. This “Canadian character type,” as critic Elizabeth Thompson calls her, is a pragmatist who discovers her own strength as she overcomes adversity. Her stalwart figure has marched through the pages of some of the best-known Canadian writers of the last one hundred years, from Ralph Connor to L.M. Montgomery, from Robertson Davies to Margaret Laurence. Her motto comes directly from Catharine Parr Traill’s The Canadian Settler’s Guide: “In cases of emergency, it is folly to fold one’s hands and sit down to bewail in abject terror: it is better to be up and doing.”

  Until I decided to write this double biography, I had not noticed how often Susanna and Catharine appear in the fiction and non-fiction of contemporary Canadian writers. More than just Canadian literary archetypes, they haunt our collective imagination. The references are not always flattering—particularly for Susanna Moodie, whose sharp tongue has always got her into trouble. The literary critic Northrop Frye dismissed her as an English snob, who, in response to the vast empty expanses of Upper Canada, developed a “garrison mentality.” The novelist Robertson Davies and the playwright Rick Salutin treated poor Susanna as both comic and shrill. Novelist Timothy Findley introduced a ghostly and grumpy Susanna, “in blowing shawls and billowing skirts,” in Headhunter. Of these characterizations, Findley’s Susanna is the most accurate portrait: she is interested in spiritualism, yearns for her dead son and doesn’t try to curry favour with anyone.

  Perhaps it is Susanna’s stalwart autonomy that accounts for the fact that women writers have treated her more sympathetically than men have. One of the earliest novels by Carol Shields, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on Susanna Moodie, features a writer who is completing a biography of Susanna Moodie and is intrigued by the contradictions in her subject’s character. “Dare I suggest a hormone imbalance?” ponders the biographer, a sensible and witty woman. “Psychological scarring? … She was so shrewd about her fellow Canadians that she enraged them, but nevertheless seemed to have had little real understanding of herself. Is it any wonder then, I ask myself as I send the manuscript off to a typist — is it any wonder that I don’t understand her?”

  The Canadian writer who has done the most to shape the popular perception of Susanna Moodie and to keep her in the forefront of our imagination is Margaret Atwood. Atwood’s long and productive relationship with Susanna began when she found the long-forgotten writer’s most famous book, Roughing It in the Bush, in the family bookcase. (Despite sharing a surname with Clinton Atwood, who married Susanna’s niece Annie Traill, Margaret Atwood is not a descendent of the Moodie-Traill clan.) In 1970, Atwood published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a powerful cycle of poetry in which she uses Susanna’s experiences as the basis for meditations on pioneer life, human dislocation and fear of the unknown.

  After we had crossed the long illness

  that was the ocean, we sailed up-river …

  We left behind one by one

  the cities rotting with cholera,

  one by one our civilized

  distinctions

  and entered a large darkness.

  It was our own

  ignorance we entered.

&
nbsp; —from “Further Arrivals”

  (© Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 1970, used by permission of Oxford University Press)

  Atwood’s insights into Susanna are stiletto-sharp. In a poem dealing with the death of Susanna’s young son, there is the heartbreaking line, “I planted him in this country like a flag.” But Atwood’s stark depiction of Susanna as hopelessly torn between English gentility and pioneer pragmatism has distorted all subsequent discussion of the nineteenth-century writer. Other aspects of Susanna’s life—including her passionate love for her husband, her fascination with spiritualism and her progressive views on education—are not mentioned.

  Atwood returned to Susanna Moodie in her ninth novel, Alias Grace. The fiction is based on a true story that Atwood first discovered in Susanna’s book Life in the Clearings versus the Bush: the story of Grace Marks, the “celebrated murderess.” Susanna’s account of Grace’s crime was third-hand, taken largely from newspapers and much embellished with Susanna’s taste for melodrama. “Mrs. Moodie is a literary lady,” Alias Grace’s disapproving Reverend Verringer pronounces, “and like all such, and indeed like the sex in general, she is inclined to [embroider.]”

  Catharine Parr Traill has had fewer walk-on roles in contemporary literature. Nevertheless, she appears, as a model of humanity and creativity. “Saint Catharine! Where are you now that we need you!” cries Morag Gunn in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. Catharine’s ability to rise above hardship and make the best of every situation is a comfort to Laurence’s twentieth-century heroine, adrift in a hostile world and infuriated by her neighbour Maudie. “At least Maudie can’t give names to the wildflowers, as you did,” reflects Morag. “Imagine naming flowers which have never been named before! Like the Garden of Eden. Power! Ecstasy! I christen thee Butter-and-Eggs!”

  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?