A short life of the author
Susanna Moodie is the most important figure in the literature of Canadian pioneer settlement — an English gentlewoman who emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832 and recorded the experience of frontier life with a combination of literary skill, mordant wit, and unflinching honesty that produced, in Roughing It in the Bush (1852), the single most famous and most widely read account of what it was like to be an educated European confronting the Canadian wilderness. The book has never gone out of print. It is read in every Canadian school. Margaret Atwood called Moodie “the spirit of the land she once hated” and made her the central figure of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), one of the most important Canadian poems of the twentieth century.
Suffolk to the Backwoods
Susanna Strickland was born in 1803 in Bungay, Suffolk, the youngest of six literary sisters — the Strickland sisters were a remarkable family, and Susanna’s sister Catharine Parr Traill also became an important Canadian writer. Susanna published poetry and children’s fiction in England before her marriage in 1831 to John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a retired military officer who had served in South Africa. Facing limited prospects in England, the Moodies emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832, part of the wave of genteel British immigrants who sought land and opportunity in the colonies.
They settled first near Cobourg and then on a farm in the backwoods near what is now Lakefield, Ontario. The experience was catastrophic. The Moodies were entirely unprepared for the realities of pioneer life — the brutal winters, the back-breaking labour of clearing land, the isolation, the poverty, the crude manners of their neighbours, and the sheer physical misery of living in a log cabin without servants, without society, and without the amenities that they had taken for granted in England.
Roughing It in the Bush
Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada was published in London by Richard Bentley in 1852. It was based on sketches and stories that Moodie had published in the Literary Garland and other Canadian periodicals during the 1830s and 1840s, revised and assembled into a continuous narrative.
The book is part autobiography, part emigrant’s manual, and part social comedy. Moodie describes her arrival in Canada, her encounters with Yankee neighbours and Irish immigrants, her struggles with cooking, farming, and housekeeping, and the gradual erosion of her genteel expectations by the relentless demands of frontier life. The tone oscillates between comedy and despair — she can be devastatingly funny about her own incompetence and her neighbours’ vulgarity, but she can also write with genuine anguish about cold, hunger, loneliness, and the fear of failure.
The book was explicitly intended as a warning to middle-class English families contemplating emigration. Moodie’s message was clear: Canada is no place for gentlefolk. The backwoods will destroy your health, your fortune, and your self-respect. This message made the book controversial in Canada, where boosters and immigration promoters resented Moodie’s negative portrait of colonial life.
Life in the Clearings
Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853) was written as a companion volume to Roughing It and described Moodie’s life after the family left the backwoods for the town of Belleville, where her husband served as sheriff. The book is less dramatic than its predecessor but arguably more interesting as social observation — it describes Canadian town life, visits to Niagara Falls and Toronto, and includes remarkable chapters on lunatic asylums, prisons, and public education that reveal Moodie as a perceptive social commentator.
The Novels
Moodie was also a prolific novelist, though her fiction has been largely overshadowed by Roughing It. Mark Hurdlestone, the Gold Worshipper (1853) and Geoffrey Moncton (1855) were conventional Victorian novels of social ambition and moral conflict. Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life (1854) was a semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman’s decision to emigrate to Canada that serves as a prequel to Roughing It.
Atwood and After
Moodie’s reputation was transformed in the 1960s and 1970s, when Canadian critics and writers rediscovered her as a foundational figure of Canadian literature. Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) reimagined Moodie as a figure haunted by the Canadian landscape — simultaneously repelled by and absorbed into the wilderness she had once despised. Atwood’s sequence made Moodie a mythic figure in Canadian literary culture, a symbol of the immigrant experience and of the ambivalent relationship between European civilisation and the North American continent.
Collecting Moodie
Roughing It in the Bush (Richard Bentley, London, 1852, 2 volumes) in first edition is the primary target and a major piece of Canadiana. The first Canadian edition (C.W. Bunce, New York, 1852) is also significant. Life in the Clearings (Bentley, 1853) is the companion volume. The novels are scarce in first edition. Moodie’s contributions to the Literary Garland (Montreal, 1838–1851) represent her earliest Canadian publications. The scholarly edition published by the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (Carleton University Press, 1988) is the standard modern text.