Sisters in the Wilderness

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.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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

“I
wonder,” 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.