Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  Kate Traill’s island of Minnewawa, on Stony Lake, where Catharine loved to smell the pines and scatter crumbs for warblers and orioles.

  As the August nights lengthened, and the evening breezes grew cooler, Kate helped her mother board the steamer for the return journey to Lakefield. Soon after Catharine was settled back in her beloved Westove, she began a letter to a cousin in England about a London publisher’s decision not to publish one of her children’s stories. “I had many misgivings as to the merits of the composition,” wrote Catharine, with typical self-deprecation. “I never see anything good in my writings till they are in print and even then I wonder how that event came to pass.”

  Catharine’s head began to nod before she had finished the letter. Kate gently took the pen out of her hand and, as her mother jerked into wakefulness again, Kate suggested to Catharine that she could finish the letter later. The old lady gave her faithful daughter a grateful, sweet smile, and settled back into her chair as the evening shadows began to lengthen.

  Catharine’s final hours were far more peaceful than those of her sister, Susanna. With the blessed calm she had radiated throughout her life, she died quietly in her sleep two days later, on August 29, 1899.

  Postscript

  The best memorial to the lives of Catharine Parr Trail and Susanna Moodie is the angel above the Moodie grave in Belleville cemetery. A stalwart figure in her carved robe and mossy wings, she towers over her neighbours and holds her arm aloft in defiance of the winds from the Bay of Quinte. In her hand she clutches a star—symbol, perhaps, of the immigrant’s hope that a better future lies ahead, and that he or she can control it. It is unlikely that the two Strickland sisters who came to Canada ever felt in control of their destiny. Yet as each neared the end of her own long life, with beloved children close by, she would have acknowledged that the journey had been worthwhile. Each had arrived in the New World a writer, and had continued writing despite hardship. Each had seen most of her children happily settled. Both had watched the rough-and-ready colony of 1832 embark on its transformation into a remarkably vigorous, prosperous nation. And through their books, both women had themselves helped to shape the culture of their adopted country—Catharine through her descriptions of landscape and natural history; Susanna through her portrayals of pioneer experiences and colonial society.

  Yet today, one hundred years after Catharine’s death, she and Susanna would find modern Canada unrecognizable. Only two of their various dwellings survive: the Moodies’ pleasant stone cottage on Belleville’s Bridge Street and Catharine’s beloved Westove in Lakefield. These homes are now jostled by brick and clapboard neighbours of much more recent date, with car ports, swing sets and gas barbecues in their yards. The rest of the log cabins and cramped cottages in which the sisters scraped and scribbled in Ontario are long gone. We have moved far beyond sagas of wilderness survival and tales of rural life.

  Hamilton Township, where the Moodies spent their miserable early months, is now dotted with gentrified farmhouses to which Torontonians drive, along a six-lane highway, for country weekends. Trailer parks and campgrounds crowd onto the south shore of Rice Lake, which Catharine described so lovingly in Canadian Crusoes. You can find historical plaques here and there, commemorating Susanna’s log cabin on Lake Katchewanooka, or the sites of Wolf Tower and Oaklands, the Traill homes on the Rice Lake Plains. But on the plaque that is planted firmly in the middle of Lakefield to mark Susanna’s connections with the village, Catharine’s name is misspelled. The most handsome mansion in Lakefield remains The Homestead: a yellow brick reminder that the only Strickland who was a successful pioneer was Sam.

  The marble angel that marks the Moodie grave in Belleville cemetery.

  Yet the legacy of Susanna and Catharine is as sturdy as Sam’s mansion or the Moodie angel in the Belleville cemetery. Their most important books are still in print. More than a century has passed since the sisters’ deaths, but plenty of contemporary Canadians have shared the feelings they captured on paper about emigration, and their ambivalent relationship with a landscape both majestic and savage. Every new Canadian who thinks longingly of “home” and every brave adventurer who sets off into the bush, brushing off black-flies and marvelling at nature, is following in the sisters’ footsteps.

  Family Trees

  Acknowledgments

  I would not have had the material, the time or the nerve to write this book had it not been for Professor Michael Peterman of Trent University. Thanks to Michael and his two colleagues, Professor Carl Ballstadt of McMaster University and Professor Elizabeth Hopkins of York University, I was able to draw on three volumes of Traill and Moodie correspondence as sources. The three academic authors collected, edited and published all the extant letters by John and Susanna Moodie, and 136 of the approximately 500 letters written by Catharine Parr Traill. The three volumes saved me from months of labour in the National Archives of Canada, squinting over copperplate handwriting and cross-written letters. In addition, throughout the gestation and birth of this book, Michael has provided information, access to his research, suggestions for further reading and feedback. He showed me around Lakefield and Peterborough, and he and his wife Cara welcomed me to their home. After our first meeting, Michael said, “Well, I think the ladies will be safe with you.” I hope I have justified his confidence.

  Both Beth Hopkins and Carl Ballstadt were also generous with their support. The insights into the sisters that I gained from Beth, as she drove me across southern Ontario one fall evening, gave valuable shape to my own impressions. I have drawn extensively on journal articles by all three authors.

  I am also indebted to two rigorous and enthusiastic readers. My good friend Sandra Gwyn rescued a first draft of the book with imaginative and clear-headed suggestions. Dr. Sandy Campbell, who teaches in the English Department of the University of Ottawa, helped place the two sisters in their literary context and drew my attention to Susanna’s slave narratives. In addition, she eagerly joined me in my exploration of the sisters’ complicated personalities and relationship, as well as their importance as nineteenth-century authors.

  It was a joy for me to rely once again on the professional advice of my agent, Jan Whitford, and to return to Penguin Books, and the careful attention of Meg Masters. Ramsay Derry, my editor, brought a sharp pencil and a sharper eye to my manuscript, and improved it in more ways than I care to admit. I would like to thank Catherine Marjoribanks for being a dream copy-editor, Susan James for her time-consuming work on production, and Laura Brady for the imaginative design of the book. Jeanne Simpson knew exactly what I meant when I asked for “maps that tell a story,” and she created four wonderful examples. She also produced the elegant illustrations of Reydon Hall and Middleton Square.

  I always enjoy walking into any of the great Ottawa repositories of national memory and discovering not only the treasures they house, but also the enthusiasm and knowledge of their staff. Both Brian Murphy and Jennifer Mueller were a pleasure to work with at the National Archives of Canada; at the National Library of Canada, Michel Brisebois searched out letters and rare books for me; the staff at the Parliamentary Library tracked down obscure titles and entries in biographical dictionaries. I was particularly thrilled to discover that the Canadian Museum of Nature had in its collection many of Catharine Parr Traill’s botanical specimen books. Mike J. Shchepanek, chief collection manager, botany section, and Micheline B. Bouchard shared my excitement as we turned the pages, and they explained to me the strengths and weaknesses of Catharine’s approach to natural history.

  In England, I should like to thank Mr. LeGrys for opening Reydon Hall, Suffolk, to me, and my friend Tosh Potts for joining me on research trips in Southwold and London. In Canada, I would like to thank David Staines, Dean of Arts at the University of Ottawa, for supplying me with the New Canadian Library editions of Catharine’s and Susanna’s most important books. I am grateful to Gerry Boyce, who shared his extensive knowledge of Belleville with me, and to Betsy Boyce, w
ho guided me through the photographic archives of the Hastings County Museum. Three people in the Peterborough area went out of their way to provide me with assistance: Connie Thompson at Hutchison House, and Jean Cole and Kathy Hooke, who fleshed out my knowledge of Stony Lake. Kathy Hooke generously sent me maps, photos and booklets and read the Stony Lake chapter for me. In Ottawa, Liz Kane walked me round her house in New Edinburgh, where Catharine stayed in 1884 as a guest of her niece Agnes Fitzgibbon.

  Much of the fun of writing this double biography came from discussions with friends and new acquaintances about the sisters. Norman Hilmer and Christopher Moore helped me with historical background. Ann Schteir discussed nineteenth-century natural history with me. Designer Paddye Mann helped me imagine what the women would have looked like and how they dressed. Clara Thomas shared her astringent (and well-informed) views on which sister would have been the most likable. Roger Hall gave me reading lists and good advice on how to deal with the value of money in the nineteenth century. Fay Sharman gave me expert advice on both sailing and plant life. Jennifer Southam allowed me to talk through my ideas as we walked. Sheila Williams, Chaviva Hosek, Barbara Uteck, Wendy Bryant, Maureen Boyd, Cathy Behan, Kyle McRobie and Judith Moses all once again convinced me that there is considerable public interest in how women in any century live their lives. Ernest Hillen convinced me that I could write a book about these two particular women. And several others gave me and my family the kind of support that allowed me to stay in my third-floor study for hours on end: they include Violeta Bonales-Hollmann, Christie Murray, Katie Plaunt, Gloria Cardoza, Monic Charlebois and Wayne McAlear.

  My parents generously and enthusiastically helped facilitate my research trips in Britain, and waited patiently as I tramped around Leith, Norwich and Suffolk. My deepest thanks, as always, go to my husband George Anderson, who always provides unconditional support and encouragement, as well as useful feedback and good suggestions on the manuscript. And I could not have written this book without my sons Alexander, Nicholas and Oliver, who make my own life worthwhile.

  This book would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the Canada Council and the Arts Committee of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton. I am grateful to both for their continued support of Canadian writers.

  Sources

  Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are themselves the main sources for this book. Thanks to the New Canadian Library imprint of McClelland and Stewart, Catharine’s The Backwoods of Canada and Susanna’s Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings versus the Bush are still in print. The University of Ottawa Press has recently issued a collection of Susanna’s short narratives, under the title Voyages (1991, edited by John Thurston), and a collection of Catharine’s sketches, under the title Forest and Other Gleanings (1994, edited by Michael A. Peterman and Carl Ballstadt). Carleton University Press has reissued Catharine’s novel Canadian Crusoes, A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains (1986, edited by Rupert Schieder). I found original copies of all the other books that the sisters wrote in Canada in the Parliamentary Library and the National Library of Canada.

  The sisters’ published works tell only half the story. For their personal letters I relied heavily on three volumes of their correspondence, published by the University of Toronto Press and edited by Professor Carl Ballstadt of McMaster University, Professor Elizabeth Hopkins of York University and Professor Michael A. Peterman of Trent University. The volumes are Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime (1985), Letters of Love and Duty, The Correspondence of Susanna and John Moodie (1993) and I Bless You in My Heart, Selected Correspondence of Catharine Parr Traill (1996). I used the Traill Family Collection in the National Archives of Canada, and the Patrick Hamilton Ewing Collection in the National Library of Canada, for additional letters from Catharine, and for letters from other members of the Strickland, Moodie and Traill families.

  Given the importance of the Strickland sisters for students of both Canadian history and Canadian literature, there have been surprisingly few attempts to describe their lives in nineteenth-century Canada. The best, Audrey Y. Morris’s The Gentle Pioneers, appeared in 1966. Other useful biographical assessments of Catharine and Susanna are G.H. Needler’s Otonabee Pioneers, The Story of the Stewarts, the Stricklands, the Traills and the Moodies (1953); Clara Thomas’s essay on “The Strickland Sisters” in The Clear Spirit, edited by Mary Quayle Innis (Toronto, 1966); Marian Fowler’s The Embroidered Tent (1982). Michael Peterman’s Susanna Moodie: A Life (1999) elegantly traces the links between Susanna’s books and her life. Sara Eaton’s Lady of the Backwoods (1969) is a cheerful account for young readers of Catharine’s life.

  There are two biographies of the formidable Agnes Strickland. The first is her sister Jane’s hagiography, published in 1887. The second is Una Pope-Hennessy’s Agnes Strickland, Biographer of the Queens of England (1940).

  PRELUDE

  Elizabeth Thompson discussed the Strickland sisters’ influence on subsequent writers in The Pioneer Woman, A Canadian Character Type (1991). Michael Peterman discussed the way subsequent writers have treated Susanna in This Great Epoch of Our Lives: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1996).

  CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3

  Details of the Strickland family in England come from a variety of sources. They include Catharine’s reminiscences published in her book Pearls and Pebbles (1894); an interview with Susanna Moodie that I found in an 1884 issue of the Toronto Globe, in the Belleville Public Library; and material from the Traill Family Collection. Carole Gerson’s article on “Mrs. Moodies’s Beloved Partner” (Canadian Literature, No. 107, Winter 1985,pp. 34–45) was a corrective to much of the criticism John Moodie has suffered over the years.

  To round out the picture of Suffolk in the early nineteenth century, I turned to Suffolk Scene by Julian Tennyson (1939); Rachel Lawrence’s Southwold River, Georgian Life in the Blyth Valley (1990); and A History of Suffolk by David Dymond and Peter Northeast Phillimore (1995). The comparison with the Austen family came to mind after I read Jane Austen, A Life by Claire Tomalin (1997).

  I learned about the position of women in Regency England in Muriel Jaeger’s Before Victoria, Changing Standards of Behaviour 1787‒1837 (1967) and in Hyenas in Petticoats by Robert Woof, Stephen Hebron and Claire Tomalin (1997). Another book that provided useful background for lives of women during this period was A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets by Kathleen Jones (1998). I learned about London in the late 1820s from James Morris’s Heaven’s Command, An Imperial Progress (1973). Information about Mary Prince and Ashton Warner comes from Dr. Sandy Campbell, of the English Department at the University of Ottawa.

  CHAPTER 4

  I learned about Leith during a personal visit, and from Hamish Coghill’s Discovering the Water of Leith (1988). I never found a good modern account of Atlantic crossings in the 1830s, but I did discover Edwin C. Guillet, a prolific historian who wrote on a wide variety of topics I wanted to know about. His book The Great Migration, The Atlantic Crossing by Sailing-Ship 1770-1860 (1963) and his pamphlet Cobourg 1798-1948, written for the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Cobourg (1948), were both useful sources. Dr. Bruce Elliot of Carleton University and Caroline Parry (author of Eleanor’s Diary) both shared their knowledge of the emigrant ships with me.

  CHAPTERS 5, 6 AND 7

  I was able to imagine Cobourg in 1832 thanks to Katherine Ashenburg’s Going to Town, Architectural Walking Tours in Southern Ontario (1996) and a wonderful little memoir of “the early days” written by a longtime resident, Mrs. David Fleming, and published by the Oshawa and District Historical Society (1960). I got a sense of what Upper Canada looked like, and how newly arrived travellers responded to it, from Early Travellers in the Canadas, 1791-1867, edited by Gerald M. Craig (1955), and from three first-hand accounts: Our Forest Home, Being extracts from the correspondence of the late Frances Stewart edited by her daughter E.S. Dunlop (1902); A Gentlewoman in Upper Canad
a, The Journals of Anne Langton edited by H.H. Langton (1950), and from John Langton’s Early Days in Upper Canada (1926).

  Gentlemen Emigrants by Patrick Dunae (1981) explained what ill-suited pioneers the Traills and Moodies were. John Thurston’s The Work of Words, The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (1996) dealt with Susanna’s shock at her first taste of the New World. Carole Gerson explored the two women’s attitudes to native peoples, and pointed out how sympathetic they were, in her article “Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill” ( Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1997, Vol. 32,No. 2). Joan Holmes explained to me who the “Chippewa Indians” were.

  CHAPTERS 8 AND 9

  William Kilbourn gave us the best biography of William Lyon Mackenzie, and the liveliest account of the 1837 Uprising, in The Firebrand (1956). Donald Creighton provided more general accounts of the history of this period in The Story of Canada (1959) and in his magnificent biography John A. Macdonald, The Young Politician, The Old Chieftain (reprinted in one volume, 1998).

  CHAPTER 10

  I spent happy hours in Belleville Public Library’s Canadiana Room, looking through old almanacs, county atlases and local histories for details of life in nineteenth-century Belleville. Information on George Benjamin came from Sheldon and Judith Godfrey’s lively and sympathetic Burn This Gossip: The True Story of George Benjamin of Belleville (1991). Information on Robert Baldwin came from J.M.S. Careless’s essay about him in the book he edited entitled The Pre-Confederation Premiers: Ontario Government Leaders, 1841-1867 (1980). For these two personalities, and most others mentioned in this book, I turned again and again to one of our greatest national publications: the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.