Sisters in the Wilderness (35 page)

Belleville's Victoria Park was a favourite picnic spot, from which families could watch sailing races or take the ferry to Prince Edward County.

The two stout matrons, both in their fifties, must have made an intriguing pair. They were unmistakably sisters: the broad Strickland brow and deep-set eyes were emphasized by the way each woman had scraped her hair back under a lace bonnet. Their accents were as crisply English as the day they'd left Suffolk, although their speech was peppered with the Scottish expressions and pronunciations picked up from their husbands. Their dress must often have occasioned comment, since each still
had a few of Agnes's cast-off collars, shawls, sashes and parasols to liven up her outfit. Both were as alert to all the life around them as ever: Catharine rhapsodized about the blossoms of the “dear little Linnae Borealis” at the edge of the wood, while Susanna kept an amused eye on which of the young people were “sparking” or flirting.

A topic of conversation to which the sisters regularly returned was their children. As young mothers they had lived so close that they continued to regard each other's family as an extension of their own, and they shared each other's maternal delights and concerns. The Traill offspring remained a tight-knit group who adored their mother, although the open contempt that James and Harry, now tall young men, showed for their father upset Catharine. Resentful of the endless farm tasks they were expected to do, they were often surly and rude. Catharine appealed to Susanna to tell the boys to curb their “want of respectfulness and deference of manner.” Catharine's two older daughters, Katie and Annie, had far more compassion for the old man. The Traill household expanded in 1855 when a nineteen-year-old emigrant, Clinton Atwood from Gloucestershire, arrived to board and learn farming. This meant more work for the women: “My dear girls are kept busy from morning till night and I can hardly keep the clothing in order for the four boys and Mr. Traill and now Clinton is added to wash iron and mend for as well,” Catharine complained. But he and Annie were soon “walking out” together. A compulsive matchmaker, Catharine was torn between delight in the romance and apprehension that she might soon lose Annie, a mainstay of the household, who kept an eye on the two youngest boys, William and Walter. Catharine's youngest daughter, Mary, frequently stayed with her Aunt Moodie for long spells. Catharine fretted that when Mary came home, she would “feel the change from a house of great plenty and every comfort to ours which is not so…. How good my sister has been to my little one.”

Susanna's house was undoubtedly more comfortable than Catharine's, but her family was less harmonious. There didn't seem to be any emotional glue to keep her five children close to home. Susanna's eldest son,
Dunbar, disappeared west to join the California gold rush. Her second son, Donald, a charmer with his father's
joie de vivre
whom Susanna adored, was costing his parents one hundred pounds a year (several thousand dollars in today's currency) because he had persuaded them to send him to the new medical school at McGill University. Rumours were already reaching Belleville that Donald was spending more time in the bars than the lecture halls. He lacked, in Susanna's eyes, “that energy which alone ensures success.” And Susanna's dire predictions about Agnes Fitzgibbon's marriage had been fulfilled: by the time she was twenty-one, Agnes had three children, was expecting her fourth, and was constantly appealing to her parents for help. In 1856, Susanna thanked her publisher Richard Bentley profusely for his latest remittance: “It enabled me to help one very dear to me, in sickness and in sorrow, when I had no other means of doing so.” Her relief was short-lived: Agnes's fourth baby died (probably of scarlet fever or meningitis) when it was four months old. “We bask for a few days in the warm sunshine of domestic happiness,” reflected Susanna, “and awake one morning to find the shadow of death resting upon our own threshold.” Ill health drove Agnes back to her parents' roof: she and her three children spent several weeks in Belleville so her mother could nurse her through sickness and depression.

There was further disruption in the Moodie household in 1855 when the Moodies' eldest daughter, Catherine, married a young businessman who had just moved from Belleville to Toronto. John Joseph Vickers ran his own delivery firm and was soon so successful that he could afford a well-built stone mansion, with separate servants' quarters, on Adelaide Street. A stolid, reliable man, Vickers was a support to his in-laws from the moment he entered the family. But like Agnes, Catherine Vickers was plagued by health problems: the doctor diagnosed chronic bronchitis. Such a condition, Susanna knew, was often confused with tuberculosis. The diagnosis “made me too anxious to think of any thing else,” she wrote. And with Catherine's departure from Belleville, Susanna had lost the mainstay of
her
household. Only Robert remained at home.

There was another topic of conversation that was of equally compelling interest to the sisters: outlets for their writing. New magazines, dishonest publishers, literary trends, money-making subjects—Susanna and Catharine each knew that her sister was more helpful on these topics than anyone else in the colony. No other women they knew combined motherhood and authorship; none of their neighbours carved out time from family responsibilities to write articles and stories for publication. Each sister encouraged the other's ideas and commiserated with her disappointments. And Susanna kept Catharine up-to-date on some of the new English authors. Anybody overhearing Susanna's critical judgments would have found them irresistibly crisp. She declared Tennyson's poem
Maud
“a ridiculous rhapsody of affectation” and Longfellow's
Hiawatha
“the most readable absurdity.”

But the sisterly and literary companionship between Catharine and Susanna faltered after the family row over
Roughing It in the Bush
. Catharine's enthusiasm for visits to the Moodies was tempered by the knowledge that Susanna would try to recruit her as an ally against Agnes. Since the publication of
Roughing It,
Agnes no longer deigned to write to “My dear Susan” and “Dearest Brother Moodie” as she had once addressed them. So as soon as Catharine arrived in Belleville, Susanna would pump her for news from Reydon Hall. The conflict of loyalties unsettled Catharine, who continued to rely heavily on the money and annual boxes of fabric, boots, clothing and books that Agnes sent. In 1854, Agnes had given her a muslin dress with blue-edged flounces, a cashmere jacket trimmed with military braid and a woollen petticoat. Catharine never dared tell her English sister how wildly inappropriate were some of the items that lay on the top of Reydon parcels—the long white gloves, the fichus of Honiton lace, the cravats for Agnes's Canadian nephews.

Catharine felt uncomfortable when Susanna criticized Agnes, because she herself was so eager for Agnes's help in London publishing circles. It was Agnes, after all, who had found her a publisher for
Canadian Crusoes,
and on whom she depended for news of reviews and sales of further
magazine pieces. But Agnes's anger at Susanna had seeped into her relationship with Catharine, and there was a note of snippy irritation in some of her letters these days. When Catharine sent Agnes a manuscript of a children's story that she had written several years earlier, which took the form of a conversation between its subjects, Agnes's response was curt: “No-one attends to books in dialogue.”

Catharine already had a new project in mind that might capitalize on her success twenty years earlier with
The Backwoods of Canada.
She planned a how-to manual for female emigrants on “Canadian m[anage]ment and all such things, in cooking and making and baking, as are needful.” She explained: “I want to supply a book that will give instruction in every branch that may be needed by the family of a new settler. A book such as I should have been glad to have had myself when I came out.” When she first mentioned the idea to Agnes, her elder sister commented tartly, “Be sure you warn ladies not to make the worst of everything.” Agnes was even snippier when Catharine sold some chapters to a Toronto periodical: “Nothing that is first published in Canada will sell in England. So never deceive yourself again with the idea that it will.” Jane was more helpful: she sent Catharine some recipes for food and wine that Catharine could include (“I am a famous wine maker”); an English cookbook so Catharine could copy the format; and instructions on how to compile an index (“a plague to do, but easy when learned”). But Elizabeth Strickland turned down Catharine's request for editorial help so rudely that Agnes felt obliged to try and repair the damage. “I am very sorry Eliza has written so unkindly to you; but it is
her way
, and you must not let it distress your mind.”

When Catharine had finished compiling her manual, she titled it “The female emigrant's guide, and hints on Canadian house-keeping” and shipped it off to England. Agnes knew Catharine depended on her, so she did try to place the manuscript with several London publishers. But as Agnes had anticipated, London publishers were not prepared to purchase a work to which they didn't have first rights. In any case, according to Agnes, they were all far too busy with the Crimean War,
which had disrupted supplies of paper and preoccupied London's chattering classes from the moment it broke out in 1852. “Nothing sells now but newspapers or books on Russia, Turkey and this horrid mess,” she wrote to Catharine in 1855.

Catharine knew all about the British campaign against Russia in the Crimean peninsula. After the mother country, alongside its allies France and Turkey, defeated the enemy at the battles of Balaclava and Inkerman, loyal Canadians, on the other side of the world, built bonfires and set off fireworks. But Agnes was right. This obsession with military glory was diverting publishers' attention from any other subjects. So Catharine decided to try her luck in Toronto, although the potential readership was far smaller and the handful of Toronto publishing houses that had sprung up were notorious cheapskates. They insisted that authors themselves finance the costs of publication by selling subscriptions to their friends and acquaintances, in the same way that magazines were financed. Catharine did her best. On one of her trips to Belleville, she signed up many of Susanna's circle as subscribers. In Peterborough, she persuaded both Ellen Dunlop and Frances Stewart not only to become subscribers themselves, but also to sell subscriptions to their neighbours. Armed with supporters, she made plans to go and butter up the Reverend Henry Payne Hope of Toronto, a recently established Toronto publisher who had used extracts from Catharine's manuscript in his monthly magazine. It was a major undertaking for Catharine to get as far as Toronto: “I have not the means either for supplying myself with decent outer clothes or to pay for a week's board and lodging at some decent house,” she complained to Ellen Dunlop. Somehow, however, she did manage to talk the Reverend Payne Hope into publishing her complete manuscript. It appeared as
The Canadian Settler's Guide
in 1855.

The Canadian Settler's Guide
fulfilled to the letter the purpose that Catharine had in mind. It contained instructions on how to make bread, carpets, candles, cheese, pumpkin pie, soap, maple sugar, bean soup, hemlock tea, dandelion coffee, treacle beer, potato starch, rag rugs, fabric dyes … amongst other items. Sam Strickland, who was always ready to
help his sisters, allowed her to use the section from his book that described how to build a log cabin and organize a logging bee. Catharine gave advice on how to furnish a log house (“A stove large enough to cook food for a family of ten or twelve persons will cost from twenty to thirty dollars”) and how to make an easy chair out of a common flour barrel.
The Guide
encompassed all Catharine's hard-won wisdom, and embodied the Strickland attitude to life. “In cases of emergency,” she wrote in the chapter on house fires, “it is folly to fold one's hands and sit down to bewail in abject terror: it is better to be up and doing.”

Once again, Catharine's book did well and Catharine did badly. The Reverend Mr. Hope was a smart businessman: he persuaded the minister of agriculture of the United Provinces to purchase six hundred copies of the guide, and the British government to make a large bulk purchase for distribution to encourage emigration. Soon copies of Catharine's guide were being passed around on the emigrant ships that continued to cross the Atlantic and dock at Grosse Ile. Catharine rapidly became the Martha Stewart of the backwoods, setting standards of taste and endurance that few other women could achieve. But Henry Payne Hope himself behaved in a thoroughly unchristian fashion. He printed more than ten editions of
The Canadian Settler's Guide
, and he used Catharine Parr Traill's name ruthlessly to promote his own career as an adviser on immigration. However, he withheld almost all the proceeds of her sales from the author.

Catharine struggled on through the 1850s, sending manuscripts to publishers in England, Scotland and Canada and receiving rejection slips for most of them. The scant rewards she received from her pen demoralized her. Little sympathy was forthcoming from her sisters in England, who were irritated with her constant pleas for help and still nursed their grudges against Susanna. But Susanna was always willing to offer consolation. She knew the uphill struggle that writers in Canada faced. “I can sympathise with you on the rejection of your ms. as Horace Bentley brought back mine,” she wrote in a reassuring note to Catharine. “In these times, people want bread more than books. Authors have but a
poor chance of success.” She empathized with her fellow author when Catharine confided her fear that she had “no brains left” and that her writing talents were in decline. By 1858, Susanna herself was in the same fix: her own income from writing had dwindled away to nothing, John's job was getting more and more difficult, Aggie Fitzgibbon's husband was sick, and the Moodies had summoned Donald home from McGill. “Poor Aggie is penniless and I have not the means to help her, even with clothes of my own, for I am literally in rags—a misfortune which has seldom happened to me before,” Susanna wrote to Catharine.