Susanna Moodie

English writer and pioneer in Canada

• Born: December 6, 1803
• Birthplace: Bungay, Suffolk, England
• Died: April 8, 1885
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

A modestly sophisticated pre-Victorian Englishwoman who was roughly tested by immigrant life in Upper Canada, Moodie recorded strong emotional responses to her experiences in autobiographical writings that make her a central figure in nineteenth century Canadian literature.

Early Life

Susanna Moodie was born Susanna Strickland, the youngest of six daughters and the sixth of eight children born to Thomas and Elizabeth (Homer) Strickland of Suffolk, England. An eccentric and precocious child with red hair and wide gray eyes, she experience wide swings between high spirits and depression that were taken as signs of her romantic temperament. Her father, who had been a manager of Greenland Dock at Rotherhithe on the River Thames, moved his family to the rural quiet of the Norfolk-Suffolk border-country, renting a manor farm called Stowe House that was beloved by his children, who gathered every morning in the parlor for lessons. The older children enacted scenes from Shakespearean plays or studied Greek and Latin under their father’s supervision, while the younger children were taught to read by their mother. Afternoons were spent in the garden, on the farmland, or other local places.

In 1808, Susanna’s family moved into Reydon Hall, a huge, drafty Elizabethan manor house in much disrepair, and Susanna and her siblings were schooled principally in mathematics, geography, sewing, handicrafts, theology, and literature. However, when Susanna’s father died in May, 1818, the family was in precarious financial straits. Lacking money for dowries, the daughters could not make many trips to London, where social and literary opportunities flourished. Nevertheless, the oldest daughter, Elizabeth (born in 1794) did find a publishing and editing career in London. The two sons, Samuel (born in 1805) and Thomas (born in 1807), left England for ventures overseas. The remaining daughters remained in Reydon Hall, with Agnes (born in 1796), Catharine (born in 1802), and Susanna launching literary careers.

Competition broke out among the literary sisters, with domineering Agnes—the first of the sisters to see her work in print—eventually settling on history as her subject. Sweet-tempered and placid Catharine preferred nature, while impulsive, defiant Susanna turned to verse and first-person narratives. Susanna renounced the Church of England in favor of Congregationalism. She also changed her politics and became involved in the abolitionist movement.

In 1831, Susanna’s life changed more dramatically after she married thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant John Dunbar Moodie, a cheerful Scot who had served in South Africa. Moodie played the flute, composed poetry, and wrote beautiful love letters but disliked his genteel poverty. In 1832—after the birth of their first child, Catharine—Susanna and her family boarded the Anne, a relatively small sailing ship crammed with seventy-two cheap-fare passengers, and sailed for Upper Canada.

Life’s Work

After arriving in Canada, the Moodies settled first in Hamilton Township, near Port Hope. While living in three different residences over eighteen months, they suffered continual antagonism from “Yankee” neighbors. Nevertheless, Susanna began to publish in North America, placing poems in New York’s The Albion and The Emigrant and in The Canadian Literary Magazine, The North American Quarterly Magazine, and various provincial newspapers.

In 1834, the Moodies acquired an uncleared lot near present-day Lakefield in Douro Township, where another daughter (Agnes) and three sons (John Alexander, Donald, and John Strickland) were born. John Moodie served in the Peterborough militia during the Mackenzie Rebellion. After he was appointed sheriff of Hastings County in 1839, the family moved to Belleville, a comparatively cosmopolitan town that was the most important settlement between Kingston and Toronto. Its Loyalist founders could trace their roots in Upper Canada back three generations. However, Belleville’s thriving economy did not camouflage its contentious politics, which pitted Tories against Reformers, Methodists against Anglicans, Irish against Scots, and Roman Catholics against Protestants.

As sheriff, John Moodie tried to remain neutral in local politics, but his enemies tried to ruin him by ensnaring him in nuisance lawsuits. Family tragedies—the death of a newborn son (George) in 1840, a fire in the family’s rented cottage during the same year, and the drowning of their son John Strickland in 1844—weighed heavily on the Moodies. Nonetheless, the family managed to survive and make important friends, including Robert Baldwin, later known as the founder of Canada’s responsible government; John Lovell, the most famous Canadian printer-publisher of his era; and Joseph Wilson, a bookstore owner, publisher, and distributor.

While living as a pioneer woman, Susanna continued to write. She smoked a clay pipe as she worked in her vegetable garden and fed the poultry in her backyard, but she also produced controversial stories and articles that did not endear her to some notable figures in Belleville. Because her formative world was English, pre-Victorian, and conservative, she always thought of herself as an Englishwoman who was compelled to reveal the problems of Canadian society and life. After she befriended John Lovell, the editor of the Montreal magazine The Literary Garland, she received regular remuneration for her writing, and from 1839 to 1851, she was the magazine’s most prolific and versatile contributor. During that period, she and her husband coedited The Literary Garland and The Victoria Magazine. The latter publication was also becoming an outlet for the other Strickland sisters. Many of the poems, sketches, and serial fiction that she published in those journals were later reworked into book form for the English publisher Richard Bentley.

Though her literary output was large, Susanna Moodie’s fame as a writer rests primarily on two books: Roughing It in the Bush: Or, Life in Canada (1852) and Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853). In both books, she forsook her fondness for the kind of romance that she found in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, one of her major literary influences. Both books are hard to classify because they contain elements of poetry, fiction, travel writing, autobiography, and social analysis. Some critics believed them to be loose in structure; others argued that their unity rests on Moodie’s sense of self as revealed by her personal voice, sense of humor, and middle-class values. This sense of self gives Roughing It in the Bush its force and vividness, as Moodie continually struggles with the loss of the Old World or with New World potentiality. What ultimately emerges from the text is its author’s adaptation to her experiences.

Structured as an account of a trip from Belleville to Niagara Falls, Life in the Clearings is a more good-humored book, although its description of social life in Canada—of which Belleville serves as a microcosm—is slowly displaced by extraneous material. Moodie reveals herself to be puritan and progressive, a genteel English traditionalist and an eager proponent of democracy. Her book’s anomalies may indicate a “Canadianness” in their balancing of extremes. Moodie is firmly optimistic as her book concludes with an affirmation of a new Canadian identity.

In 1863, when Susanna was approaching sixty years of age, she and her husband retired to a small cottage on the outskirts of Belleville. There Susanna divided her time between nursing her ailing husband and writing a long novel, The World Before Them (1868). In the fall of 1869, her beloved husband died, and she plunged into chronic gloom, loneliness, and ill health. As her body declined, she was forced to live with her children in Belleville, Seaforth, and Toronto, and with her sister Catharine in Lakefield. She lived long enough to oversee the publication of the first Canadian edition of Roughing It in the Bush before she died in Toronto on April 8, 1885.

Significance

Although initially unpopular among Canadian readers because of its sentimentality about the Old World and the sometimes snobbish distance that Susanna Moodie puts between herself and others, Roughing It in the Bush has achieved the status of a Canadian literary classic as social history, autobiography, personal essay, and miscellany. Moodie’s humor, enthusiasm, frustration, and depression inform the text, and the book is full of suspense and color.

Moodie’s characters are a cross section of bush society, and the book offers lessons about early immigrant experience in a new, often rugged and hostile land. As Moodie puts aside some of her early social and cultural prejudices so she can come to terms with her new world, her writing reduces its reliance on conventional phrases and sentiments about civilization and the wilderness. In this way, both Moodie and her sister Catharine Parr Traill—another noted writer in Canada—helped lay the foundation of a literary tradition that still endures in the country.

It is unlikely that Moodie ever felt in control of her destiny in Canada, but as she took note of the transformation of the rough colony of 1832 into a vigorous, prosperous nation, she helped to shape the culture of her adopted country. While her sister Catharine was important for descriptions of landscape and natural history, Moodie was important for her evocations of colonial society, even though her personal relationship with the country was ambivalent. The most important books of both sisters are still in print and are studied in universities across the land.

Bibliography

Fowler, Marian. The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada. Toronto: Anansi, 1994. A mixture of scholarship and journalism, with notable wit, this book offers a fast-moving narrative about Elizabeth Simcoe, Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Anna Jameson, and Lady Dufferin.

Gray, Charlotte. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Toronto: Viking Press, 1999. A brilliantly clear picture of two sisters from England who became Canadian literary icons. Shows character of backwoods and clearings of Upper Canada and uses the sisters’ correspondence, personal papers, and published works. Meticulously researched, beautifully told and illustrated.

Peterman, Michael. Susanna Moodie: A Life. Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1999. This first critical biography of Susanna Moodie takes readers into her precocious English childhood, then follows her development as an independent-minded young gentlewoman with a social conscience and love for writing, a devoted farm wife, mother, and true pioneer.

Thurston, John. The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. A comprehensive examination of the entire range of Moodie’s writing that aims to dispel some of the myths about her life and work.