Sisters in the Wilderness (2 page)

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.

—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?

I found the answers to these questions in three recently published volumes of their personal papers held in various archives (principally in the National Archives of Canada and the National Library). In the unvarnished prose of old journals and yellowing letters, a different picture of each sister emerges. I learned of Susanna's quiet competence, even as she put on paper her sense of helplessness in the woods. I read about the disasters and family trials behind the brave face Catharine always wore. I realized how much the sisters relied on one another, as a link with the Old Country and as a source of support for each other's creative efforts. I understood the importance to Catharine and Susanna of a third sister, the intimidating Agnes Strickland, in England. The sisters came alive for me, as flesh-and-blood women at the centres of their families. There is much more to both of them than they ever allowed their own readers to know.

Most of all, I began to understand the stamina, talent and determination that allowed two English ladies to overcome the hardships of pioneer life and leave a powerful legacy to Canadian culture. They never achieved their hopes of joining the Canadian land-owning cream, but over the past 150 years, they have successfully forced themselves to the top of our literary milk-pot.

Sisters in the Wilderness

Prelude

February 1834

T
all, dense pine trees loomed over the Moodies, blocking any glimpse of the night sky, as they wearily clambered down from the heavy, horse-drawn sleigh. Susanna, John and their two little girls were exhausted, hungry and chilled to the bone. For eighteen hours they had lurched across packed snow and frozen swamp and through thick, silent forest. Now they had finally arrived at the home of Susanna's sister Catharine Parr Traill and her husband Thomas, just north of the little Upper Canadian town of Peterborough. Golden light flooded out of the log cabin's open door: Susanna stumbled towards its promise of warmth and shelter—and reunion with her beloved sister.

Was it really less than two years since the sisters had last seen each other? It felt like half a lifetime. Back then, the two young women had been rising stars in the lively literary world of Regency London. They had more than enough talent and education to become serious writers: only the
straitened circumstances of their own family, and their husbands' poor prospects, had held them back. Persuaded by their husbands that they would have a better future in the colonies, they had said goodbye to each other on the pebble beach of Southwold, in Suffolk. Then each couple had made their own way across the Atlantic, towards Upper Canada, for a new life in a New World.

So far, however, the New World had proved more hostile than they had ever imagined. As Susanna huddled in the sleigh throughout that long February day, she wondered whether she would ever be able to carve a comfortable life out of this wilderness, let alone achieve the success as an author she had once dreamed of. “I gazed through tears upon the singularly savage scene around me,” she wrote years later in her most famous book,
Roughing It in the Bush
, “and secretly marvelled, ‘What brought me here?'” Catharine had found the landscape equally overpowering, admitting in her first Canadian book,
The Backwoods of Canada
, that “the long and unbroken line of woods … insensibly inspires a feeling of gloom almost touching on sadness.”

Could these two women ever come to terms with Canada? In 1834,it seemed unlikely. During their first eighteen months in the colony, they had not even managed to see one another. Poor communications, primitive roads, family responsibilities and the relentless daily demands of pioneer farms had kept them apart, although only fifty miles separated them. But now, at least, they would have each other. Close allies since childhood, they would at last be able to share their fears and lift each other's morale.

When Susanna appeared in the doorway of her cabin, Catharine rushed to embrace her. Tears sprang to Susanna's eyes as she heard her sister's voice and felt Catharine's arms encircle her. The two young women clung to each other in an explosion of joy. Years later, Susanna wrote: “I never enjoyed more heartily a warm welcome after a long day of intense fatigue, than I did that night of my first sojourn in the backwoods.”

Chapter 1

New Beginnings

T
he childhood of Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie in the early 1800s was very similar to that of Jane Austen, born a quarter of a century earlier. Like her, they grew up in rural England, with its settled rhythms and reassuring continuity. And like the Austen family in Hampshire, the Stricklands didn't quite fit into the society of prosperous landowners who were their neighbours in Suffolk. Thomas Strickland, father of Catharine and Susanna, had lifted his family out of the lower reaches of gentility, but failed to slot his children safely into the ranks of East Anglia's landed gentry. As a result, the Strickland girls, like Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra, felt themselves to be on the margins of county society and became acutely attuned to social nuance. The sense during their childhood of being outsiders affected each of them in different ways.

Suffolk, in the early nineteenth century, was a county of sleepy villages and medieval churches.

Neither Thomas nor his wife was native to Suffolk. Susanna's and Catharine's father was born in 1758 in London, to a respectable but penniless family that had drifted south from Yorkshire. As a teenager, he joined a shipping company called Hallet and Wells, and he spent most of his early adult life in the east end of the smoky, noisy city. Thomas rose in the firm to become master and sole manager of the Greenland docks near Rotherhithe, and the owner of several properties in the east end of London.

Thomas Strickland was married in 1789 to Susanna Butt, a grandniece of Sir Isaac Newton, the great English mathematician and astronomer. But the first Mrs. Strickland died in 1790, within a few months of their marriage. Three years later, when he was thirty-five, Thomas Strickland married again, this time to twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Homer. It was a productive match. In the first ten years of marriage, Thomas and Elizabeth had six daughters: Elizabeth (known as Eliza) arrived in 1794, Agnes in 1796, Sarah (known as Thay) in 1798, Jane in 1800, Catharine Parr (named after Henry
VIII
's sixth wife, with whom there was a vague ancestral link) in 1802 and Susanna in 1803. Two sons subsequently took their places in the nursery—Samuel in 1805 and Thomas in 1807—but they were never players in their sisters' nursery games.

Thomas Strickland didn't really enjoy the bustle of Rotherhithe: his heart lay in his library, not his wharves. He took particular pride in the books and memorabilia once owned by Newton that his first wife had brought into his household. And he suffered from gout—an excruciatingly painful complaint. For health reasons, and with hopes of bettering his social position, Thomas decided in 1803 to leave the city and move to Suffolk.