Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  In 1872, however, the two sisters were still looking at an empty expanse of glistening water and an unbroken shoreline. As the Chippewa’s paddle slowed, and the vessel came to a halt about twenty-five miles from Lakefield, the men in the party retrieved their fishing rods and baited their hooks. The Reverend Mr. Clementi and Percy Strickland were particularly lucky, and soon several plump black bass and salmon trout were gutted and ready to be fried on a portable stove. They made “a capital dinner,” in Susanna’s opinion. Then the party disembarked on the north shore, where there was a natural landing place, called “Julien’s landing” after an old French-Canadian fur trader who had built a shack there. Kate Traill set off to climb a nearby hill, called “the big sugar loaf rock,” while the elderly members of the party sought the shade of the woods. Some aspects of the wilderness had not changed in three decades: the black-flies and mosquitoes were still relentless. Catharine, hot on the trail of a delicate fern that she just knew lingered in these woods, brushed them off with an imperious wave of her hand. But Susanna had never made the best of things, and she was not about to start now. As she angrily tried to swat the insects, she almost stepped on a snake. It was enough to send her marching back on board. Nevertheless, she described the trip to friends as “a grand party.”

  After she was widowed, in 1869, Susanna had been slow to take up Catharine’s invitations to stay with her at Westove, in Lakefield. Susanna never displayed either the sense of family or the instinct for survival that Catharine always had. When Catharine was vulnerable, she retreated without hesitation into the comforting Lakefield fold of the Strickland clan. She had done this both in 1832, when the Traills first arrived in Canada, and in 1859, after Thomas Traill’s death. But Susanna floundered after John’s death, just as the Moodies had floundered after their arrival in Upper Canada in 1832. She had no roof to call her own, and she spent the rest of her life ricocheting amongst various friends and relations. The trip to Stony Lake took place at the start of one of her longest sojourns with Catharine at Westove, after Susanna had tried and rejected a variety of other options.

  Immediately after John’s death, Susanna had joined her youngest son, Robert, in Seaforth, sixty miles northwest of Toronto. Of Susanna’s five children, only her youngest son had felt the full force of this passionate woman’s love. Robert had been born in the relative comfort of the Belleville years. By the time he was a toddler, Susanna had lost one child in infancy and another child, Johnnie, in a drowning accident. Little Robert was infinitely precious to her—and like his father, he could always raise her spirits. After John’s death, he was the first to insist that Susanna should come and live with him. He had recently been appointed stationmaster at Seaforth, which was on the Grand Trunk Railway branch-line between Goderich and Stratford. His offer to Susanna was more than generous, since it meant that he would have to support, on a very limited salary, not only his delicate wife Nellie and their three small children, but a mother and a mother-in-law who couldn’t stand each other. They were all crammed into a badly built, four-room house, the front door of which opened directly onto the platform. Every time a train thundered by, or drew to a shuddering halt, the house shook. Nellie’s mother, Mrs. Russell, constantly shrieked at the children or slapped them, setting off gales of tears. Susanna spent most of her time in her own bedroom, painting, knitting or writing, and wishing she had somebody to talk to. “Ah my dear sister,” she wrote to Catharine. “My poor, sore heart is so empty….The days seem so long and sad.”

  Susanna, alone and lonely.

  After a year of the chaos in Robert’s household, Susanna had had enough. Catharine entreated her sister to come and stay with her, but Susanna yearned to return to Belleville and John’s grave. “Whenever, lately, I visited my husband’s grave, it appeared to me such a blessed haven of rest, that I longed with an intense longing to lie down beside him. Poor darling, the harebells and Ox-eyes were growing upon his lowly bed … ” She decided to take lodgings in Belleville with some old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Rous. But this arrangement soured, because Susanna found the Rous daughter “selfish, indolent and conceited” and Mrs. Rous’s stews and hashes indigestible. “It is quite a misfortune to have been a good cook,” she wrote to Catharine. “It makes one very dainty, but I can’t help it.” She moved on to rooms with Mrs. John Dougall, on the Kingston Road. But she grumbled that Mrs. Dougall was not feeding her properly, despite the ample rent she was paid. Her health deteriorated. “I have suffered awful agonies from inflammation of the stomach and bowels and frightful haemorrhage which has reduced me to a bag of bones,” she complained to friends.

  Robert Moodie, Susanna’s beloved youngest child, with his wife Nellie and one of their seven children.

  Susanna’s health problems weren’t helped by two worries. She wanted to continue her literary career—in particular, she was eager to publish some of her husband’s work. But without John’s guidance, her writing and editing skills deserted her. She agreed to let George Maclean Rose, of the Toronto publishing house Hunter, Rose and Company, bring out a new edition of her own Roughing It in the Bush, but she couldn’t even draft an updated introduction. “You must help me with matter for the Canadian preface,” she implored Katie Vickers. “I forget all the subjects dear John told me to write about on the present state and prospects of Canada.” It took her months to draft an introductory chapter in which she defended herself against her critics, celebrated the progress of the previous forty years and insisted that “some of the happiest years of my life” had been spent in the colony.

  The second source of stress for Susanna was her family. Susanna’s relations with her eldest four children continued to deteriorate. As adults, both Katie and Agnes found their mother exasperating. When she stayed with them, she was demanding and critical. Susanna was a little too free with her opinions on child-raising and sketch-writing (“I think her publishing has not been profitable,” she wrote to her sister Catharine, about Agnes Chamberlin, “but she would not listen to my advice”). Susanna’s devotion to her husband had been particularly hard for the two boys, Dunbar and Donald, who always felt second-best. In 1866, to his mother’s consternation, shiftless Donald had married Julia Russell, the sister of Dunbar’s wife Eliza. Susanna had now decided that she didn’t like either of the two Jamaican sisters, and she could never resist being catty about them in her letters to Catharine (“It is only that horrid woman,” she told her sister, that prevented Donald from writing home). By the 1870s, both men were living as far away from their mother as they could afford on very limited means. Dunbar was in Colorado, in an experimental agricultural community. Donald was an alcoholic, who was constantly scrounging money from relatives and whose wife eventually left him. Neither ever visited their widowed mother, although she always kept in touch with both of them.

  Robert Moodie was more sympathetic to his mother than his elder brothers and sisters. But he was struggling with health and financial problems of his own, which worried Susanna. “The dear kind fellow has a shocking cough,” Susanna wrote to Catharine, “and is very thin and delicate.” As though he did not have tribulations enough, an additional blow struck in 1871. His wife Nellie was overcome with what Susanna described as “raving madness.” Today, Nellie would be diagnosed as suffering from postnatal depression: she had just given birth to her fourth child, and was subject to alternating fits of weeping and rage. But there was no clear diagnosis one hundred years ago. Instead, she was committed to the grim wards of Toronto’s Lunatic Asylum, whose “raving maniacs” (including the murderess Grace Marks) Susanna had visited twenty years earlier. Robert was left with four young children, an unpleasant mother-in-law and bills for both Nellie’s treatment and his baby’s wet-nurse.

  Susanna was stuck. She didn’t like her Belleville lodgings, but she could not return to Robert’s cramped household. Sensing her sister’s unhappiness, Catharine continued to press her to come and live in Lakefield. Susanna did not really want to be her sister’s guest—she va
lued her independence, and she knew that Westove had become a refuge for lame ducks. Every fatherless child, ailing friend and grumpy adolescent within the extended Strickland network knew that Aunt Traill’s door was always open to them. But there were few alternatives for Aunt Moodie. So in the spring of 1872, Susanna accepted her sister’s invitation and boarded the train to Peterborough.

  Catharine always loved family reunions. She and her daughter Kate put a stove, a carpet and a cherrywood dresser in the unused bedroom on the second floor for Susanna, and Catharine wrote in delight that “my dear sister Moodie” was going to be “an inmate with us.” At first, Susanna was profoundly relieved to have found such a pleasant home. “Nothing could exceed the kindness of my dear sister and her good daughter,” she told her daughter Katie Vickers. “We live twice as well as I did at Mrs. D.’s, without the miserable and begrudged scarcity and eternal liver and fish dinners. If I feel hungry I can get a bit of bread and butter without having to keep a store of food in private.” As summer approached, she sat in Catharine’s garden, “in a dreamy sort of rapture communing with nature and my own soul,” smelling the lilac and honeysuckle that her sister had planted and watching “the bright winged birds and butterflies disport themselves.” Catharine’s carefully nurtured collection bed of twenty-five different kinds of fern did not interest Susanna, but the summer riot of roses and delphiniums brought back pleasant memories of Suffolk. Often, she would take Catharine’s four-year-old granddaughter Katie Traill down to the water’s edge to watch the perch and sunfish darting through the shadows just below the surface.

  The arrangement appeared to suit everybody. From England, Sarah Strickland Gwillym wrote to Susanna to express the satisfaction felt by all four English sisters, now well into their seventies and in varying degrees of health: “I cannot say how glad I am that you have arranged to live with dear Kate. I think it will be a mutual comfort to you both.” Agnes and Sarah probably hoped that if their Canadian sisters shared living expenses, they would need fewer handouts from home.

  However, the English sisters might have guessed that Susanna and Catharine would not be happy under one roof for long. They themselves had refused to contemplate living with each other. To Agnes’s chagrin, she had been unable to bully Sarah into allowing her to move into Sarah’s comfortable home in the Lake District. Agnes, in turn, had refused to allow Jane to share her elegant Georgian house in Southwold, purchased after their mother’s death and the sale of Reydon Hall. Jane had had to content herself with buying a humble cottage next door to Agnes. Elizabeth wouldn’t live with anybody: she preferred a reclusive life in her own house, Abbott’s Lodge, in Tilford, Surrey. The only relative she visited was her brother Tom, now retired from the merchant navy. Given this pattern of scratchy relationships, it is no surprise to discover that harmony did not prevail for long at Westove, either.

  Susanna and Catharine were too different, and by now too set in their ways, to live together. If anyone was sick, Catharine would start boiling roots and herbs, according to old Indian recipes. Some of her remedies sound terrifying: the limewater gargle that she recommended for a sore throat consisted of diluted quicklime. Susanna, on the other hand, would insist on producing Brown’s Bronchial Troches or Ayre’s Liver Pills—nostrums that were all the rage in the late nineteenth century but were rarely effective. When Catharine’s daughter Annie Atwood arrived with an unruly swarm of children, Susanna would get snappy. (“You must just turn a deaf ear to criticisms on the little ones as though you heard it not,” Catharine told Annie. “It is just her way you know.”) Susanna objected to the number of people continually trooping through the house, and the consequent expense. (“Aunt has only a few dollars in the Bank,” she wrote to her daughter Katie Vickers. “But she will entertain … ”) Sarah Gwillym, on the other side of the Atlantic, got the impression that the household was messy and disorganized. When an envelope arrived in England with unfinished scraps of two letters from Catharine, Sarah wrote back: “Tell her with my love that her last letters were rather disappointing….I suppose that as she seemed to have more than a houseful of people with her that she had more on her hands than she could well get through, poor dear, though I suppose that in Canada all visitors help till all the duties are done.”

  Susanna spent more and more of her time in her bedroom, reading and going through old papers rather than joining the endless family gatherings in the drawing room downstairs. She refused to join Catharine for overnight visits to relatives’ houses. She had been asked by a collector for a copy of her famous sister Agnes Strickland’s autograph, and as she searched through a pile of old letters, she was often moved to tears. “I had no idea that I had so many, and such long letters from Agnes, and until my unlucky book was published, so full of affection,” she told Katie Vickers, adding triumphantly, “Mrs. Traill seemed quite astonished that Agnes had written such letters to me!” As the months went by, Susanna’s thoughts of Agnes became increasingly fond and she barely remembered how Agnes’s reaction to Roughing It in the Bush had stung her.

  In 1872, Susanna and Catharine were disturbed to hear that Agnes, now seventy-six, had suffered a serious fall on the stairs of a friend’s house and broken her leg. Jane Strickland wrote from Southwold that the accident had been a prelude to serious bronchial problems for Agnes: “the attack was both paralytic and apoplectic, but you must not name it to her or let any of her relatives in Canada mention it as that would make her unhappy.” Agnes’s health slowly collapsed, and she died in July 1874. A few weeks later, her brother Thomas Strickland passed away.

  Susanna expressed quite as much grief as Catharine at Agnes’s death. She was quick to correct various errors made in an obituary that appeared in the Toronto Globe, and to add a eulogy of her own: “An affectionate, loving daughter, a faithful sister and friend, kind and benevolent to the poor, and possessing warm sympathies for the sick and suffering; she never let the adulation of the world interfere with the blessed domestic charities.”

  But indomitable Agnes had never forgiven her youngest sister for that “unlucky book.” At her death, she was not going to give Susanna the pleasure of believing that she could rival Catharine as the family favourite. Susanna must have been stunned when, a few weeks later, she heard the contents of Agnes’s will. Agnes left the copyright to her Lives of the Queens of England, still a bestseller in Victorian England, jointly to Catharine Parr Traill and Percy Strickland. (Her sister Elizabeth was furious, since by rights half belonged to her; however, Elizabeth died the following year). There was no specific bequest for Susanna. Agnes did not leave her sister even a single keepsake from Reydon, “which was rather mean I must say,” Catharine acknowledged.

  In the fall of 1874, a large box arrived in Lakefield from Sarah Gwillym. It contained a treasure-trove: the splendid wardrobe in which Agnes had made her entrances at various royal, noble and civic occasions. Catharine pulled out black silk and brocade gowns, jet and gold jewellery, pearl-encrusted collars and intricate lace flounces, whalebone corsets and horsehair petticoats, muslin underskirts and voluminous velvet cloaks, elaborately decorated bonnets, shawls and gloves. “It is so many years ago since I looked upon articles so rich and costly,” she marvelled. Most articles were distributed amongst various granddaughters and great-nieces. The only items Susanna received were a bracelet and a jasper brooch.

  Soon after the parcel arrived, Susanna decided to leave Lakefield. Perhaps she had simply had enough of Westove’s endless stream of relatives with their crying babies. It must have been hard for her to stomach the contrast between Catharine’s children, who showered their mother with affection and worried about her health, and her own offspring, whose attention to her was fitful at best. Or maybe she left because Agnes’s will, with its ostentatious concern for Catharine and disregard for Susanna, pushed her youngest sister’s nose painfully out of joint. For whatever reason, Susanna packed her bags and took the train back to Toronto.

  From now on, Susanna stayed only a few weeks at Lak
efield each summer, and spent the rest of the time in Toronto, where Robert now lived, and where she could be close to her Moodie and Vickers grandchildren. There was a more varied stream of visitors in Toronto than in Lakefield to amuse Susanna with talk of exotic new fashions, such as spotted veils and women’s rights. It was still not very comfortable living with Robert (he moved house seven times in less than three years), but Nellie Moodie had returned home after three years in the asylum and was willing to cherish her cantankerous mother-in-law.

  Susanna was a petulant old woman, but she always kept her sense of humour. Her own children found her moods hard to bear, but her grandchildren appreciated her mischievous stories about their relatives. Who wouldn’t be amused by a grandmother who wrote funny verse, as Susanna did to fourteen-year-old William Vickers, the fourth of Katie Vickers’s ten children? William, a student at Upper Canada College in Toronto, had lost the March 1885 that the old lady seemed ready another pair. Susanna replied: