|
|
|
List of Poets Comments |
Susanna Moodie (1803-1885)
Susanna Moodie was a prolific writer of poetry, short stories, articles and novels, but is best known for Roughing It in the Bush, a personal narrative of her immigration to the Canadian wilderness that has become a Canadian literary classic. Born Susanna Strickland near Bungay, Suffolk, England, on December 6, 1803, she was the youngest daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Homer Strickland. In 1808, the family moved to Reydon Hall, near Southwold in Suffolk. Thomas Strickland conscientiously educated his six daughters and two sons, stressing discipline, self-reliance and practicality. A large library provided the children with literary and imaginative stimulus, and from their childhood, the Strickland sisters were drawn to theatre, poetry and history. Following their father’s death in April 1818, they earned much-needed income by writing natural history, moral and historical tales for children, and sketches, stories and poems for periodicals and annuals. Indeed, all but one of the Strickland sisters made a career of writing. The eldest sisters, Elizabeth and Agnes, achieved fame and social prominence in England as co-authors of Lives of the Queens of England (1840-1848) and other biographies of the British aristocracy. Jane Margaret Strickland specialized in moral tales and histories, while Susanna, along with her sister Catharine (as Catharine Parr Traill) and their brother Samuel Strickland, gained recognition as recorders and interpreters of pioneering and settling in early-19th-century Upper Canada. Susanna, like her sisters, began writing at an early age. Her first story, Spartacus : A Roman Story (1822), was published when she was 19, and is an admiring and heroic portrait of this historical figure. It was followed by a number of morally instructive stories for children and adolescents, among them The Little Quaker; or, The Triumph of Virtue and The Little Prisoner; or, Passion and Patience. Many of these tales are marked by religious imagery, conversions and death-bed repentances. During the late 1820s, several literary contacts became important to the development of Susanna Strickland’s writing career. Thomas Harral, a family friend, moved from Suffolk to London to edit La Belle Assemblée, a fashionable literary magazine. From 1827 to 1830, Susanna contributed poems and stories to Harral, including a series of sketches of Suffolk life whose style prefigured her later work, Roughing It in the Bush. Her friend, Thomas Pringle, the Scottish poet, played a pivotal role in both her literary and personal life. Pringle, as secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in England, introduced Susanna to the injustices of slavery. For the society she wrote two antislavery tracts, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831) and Negro Slavery Described by a Negro (1831), establishing herself as a writer committed to humanitarian issues. It was at Pringle’s home, in 1830, that she met her future husband, Lt. John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie. In 1831, with Pringle’s help, Susanna Strickland published Enthusiasm, and Other Poems, a collection of her early poetry. Showing the influence of the Romantic movement, her poetry also reveals her religious orientation. The title poem dismisses all human enthusiasms, except for devotion to God. The theme that generally pervades the volume is that of the poet as prophet issuing warnings about the transitory nature of earthly pleasures, and declaring the need for humility and faith. Yet some poems in the collection reveal the author’s delight in nature and a more romantic vision of the world. Susanna wrote a great deal of poetry in her literary career, and often embellished her prose works with poetic epigraphs and resolutions. Susanna Strickland’s life changed dramatically when she married Lt. John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie in London in April, 1831. Lt. Moodie was an officer on half-pay and a writer who had come to London from his Orkney farm to pursue his literary interests. The Moodies lived in London for a short time before moving to Southwold, where their first child was born. In July of 1832, seeking a more financially secure future, they immigrated to Canada, and bought a partially cleared farm near Cobourg, in Upper Canada. In February of 1834, they sold the farm and moved to the wilderness area north of present-day Lakefield, to be closer to Susanna’s sister, Catharine Parr Traill, and their brother, Samuel Strickland, who had settled there. The Moodies remained on their bush farm for six years, struggling to make a living on land that was not arable. During this time, Lt. Moodie served in the militia during and following the Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837. Late in 1839, he was appointed sheriff of the newly established county of Hastings, and he, Susanna and their five children were finally able to leave the backwoods. They moved to the town of Belleville early in 1840, where two more children were born. Tragically, one of their children, John, died by drowning in 1844. Her trials and tribulations in the backwoods did not deter Susanna Moodie from her literary pursuits. She submitted some items, chiefly poems, to American and Canadian periodicals, and began to write for the Literary Garland, of Montreal, in 1838. During the life of that magazine (1838-1851) she was its most prolific contributor, submitting serialized novels based on English life, poems on English and Canadian subjects, and a series of six “Canadian Sketches” that formed the nucleus of Roughing It in the Bush. Also, in 1847-1848, Susanna and John Moodie jointly edited The Victoria Magazine in Belleville. They wrote much of the material themselves and Susanna submitted two more “Canadian Sketches” to this publication. The high point of Susanna Moodie’s career occurred in 1852 with the launching of her best-known book, Roughing It in the Bush: or, Life in Canada published by Richard Bentley of London, England. The book is a series of sketches reflecting the Moodies’ experience of and responses to the culture shock, the ordeals and the pleasures of immigration and pioneer life, from their arrival at the quarantine station of Grosse Isle in 1832, to their departure from the backwoods in 1840. Moodie’s frank and vivid account of her pioneering experiences is depicted with humour and restraint and demonstrates her powers of observation and insight. Roughing It found favour with the public, and there were several editions issued by Bentley and by an American publisher in the 1850s. A Canadian edition did not appear until 1871, but its appearance renewed interest in the work, and more Canadian and American editions followed. Through the years, Roughing It has been valued both as a social document of the Canadian experience and as a work of literature. Inspired by the success of Roughing It in the Bush, and urged on by her publisher, Bentley, Susanna Moodie quickly wrote two books to compliment it. Flora Lyndsay; or Passages in an Eventful Life (1853) is an autobiographical account of a young British couple’s preparations for leaving England and their voyage to Canada, while Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853) depicts life in the towns of Canada in the mid-19th century and documents a trip from Belleville to Niagara. Together, these three books create a trilogy of immigrant experience. Moodie also wrote several less successful novels for Bentley that drew heavily on Gothic and romatic conventions. Among these were Mark Hurdlestone; or The Gold Worshipper (1853), Matrimonial Speculations (1854), and Geoffrey Moncton; or The Faithless Guardian (1855). This period of intense creativity ended in 1855, and after that, Susanna Moodie did not do much writing. The demise of the Garland in 1851 and the relative unavailability of other outlets for her writing in Canada was undoubtedly a factor. In the mid 1860s, financial difficulties led her to submit work to Bentley again and he published Moodie’s The World Before Them in 1868. Occasional pieces by Moodie also appeared in Canadian periodicals of the 1860s and 1870s, and her final novel, George Leatrim; or the Mother’s Test was published in Edinburgh in 1875. The 1860s were difficult years for the Moodies. John Moodie was forced to resign his position as sheriff in 1863, and was unable to gain another position. In financial straits, the Moodies were forced to move to a smaller dwelling, and Susanna sold paintings of flowers to earn some much-needed income. John Moodie’s health declined, and he died in October of 1869. Susanna had enjoyed a strong emotional and intellectual relationship with her husband, and she was devastated by his loss. She moved from Belleville, and spent the remaining years of her life living with her married children. She died in Toronto in 1885 at the age of 81. Although Susanna Moodie wrote numerous poems, short stories, articles and novels through her long and varied career, it is her narrative sketches, epitomized in Roughing It in the Bush, that have secured for her an enduring place in Canadian literary history. Susanna Moodie’s papers are held at the National Library of Canada and the National Archives of Canada. Biography by: Selected Works by Susanna Moodie
|
