Sisters in the Wilderness (31 page)

Bentley, a clever, cosmopolitan man who always dressed immaculately in starched wing collar and cuffs, had the most prestigious list of authors in the English-speaking world. He had bought up the copyrights
to Jane Austen's six novels, and he published works by Anthony Trollope, Maria Edgeworth, Wilkie Collins and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Bentley's office on New Burlington Street, close to Piccadilly, hummed with literary gossip as authors and literary patrons came and went. So it was a coup for Susanna when Bentley offered her fifty pounds as an initial payment for the new manuscript, plus a share of the profits. It was a modest advance: Bentley paid most of his authors between two hundred and three hundred pounds. But Susanna, it appears, was satisfied. The book was published in two volumes, priced at a one pound, one shilling, under the title
Roughing It in the Bush,
in 1852, the same year that Catharine's children's novel, C
anadian Crusoes
, appeared.

Susanna Moodie would never have claimed that her sketches added up to autobiography (such a term was barely known outside literary London in these years). She didn't even have the temerity to call them “memoirs” or “reflections.” Her only non-fiction model was the kind of travel writing exemplified by Anna Jameson's account of a visit to Canada,
Winter studies and summer rambles in Canada,
published in London in 1838. But she knew her own strengths as a writer. “A scene or picture strikes me as a whole, but I never can enter into details,” she explained to her publisher. “A carpet must be very brilliant, the paper on a wall very remarkable before I should ever notice either, while the absurd and the extravagant make lasting impressions, and I can remember a droll speech or a caricature face for years.” In her description of pioneer life, she exploited to the full her sense of the ridiculous, her ear for dialogue and her fascination with human behaviour. She strayed close to fiction at some points, as she obscured the identities of her subjects, stretched the facts to make a better story, and skewed the truth by filtering it through her own sensibility. The result is an enthralling account of life in the bush, featuring characters that are as fresh today as when Susanna wrote about them more than 150 years ago.
Roughing It in the Bush
is a far livelier, more original work than any of the clichéd poetry and sentimental fiction she had been churning out for more than twenty years. Of all the books that she and Catharine wrote, it is the best.

Susanna's stated intention in
Roughing It in the Bush
was to describe the experience of emigration without the misrepresentations that hucksters like Cattermole had spread in the early 1830s. “Oh, ye dealers in wild lands—ye speculators in the folly and credulity of your fellow men—what a mass of misery …have ye not to answer for!” Susanna wrote in her introduction. She accused the land speculators of persuading the gullible that “sheep and oxen … ran about the streets [of the New World] ready roasted, and with knives and forks upon their backs.” She was committed to the truth, as she made plain in her opening epigraph:

I sketch from Nature, and the picture's true;

Whate'er the subject, whether grave or gay,

Painful experience in a distant land

Made it mine own.

Susanna was at pains to show the dark underbelly of experiences that her own sister Catharine had written about with gentle joy. In
The Backwoods of Canada,
for example, Catharine had described the “bee” during which the Traills' neighbours had helped the newcomers raise the walls of their first log cabin. Catharine had made the communal feast of whisky, salt pork and rice pudding sound like a dainty tea party: “In spite of the difference of rank among those that assisted at the bee, the greatest possible harmony prevailed, and the party separated well pleased with the day's work and entertainment.” In
Roughing It in the Bush,
Susanna told a very different story. Bees presented “the most disgusting picture of a bush life. They are noisy, riotous, drunken meetings, often terminating in violent quarrels, sometimes even in bloodshed.”

There was a vivid immediacy to Susanna's descriptions. In a passage describing the Moodies' arrival at their first home in Hamilton Township, she wrote, “I was perfectly bewildered—I could only stare at the place, with my eyes swimming in tears; but as the horses plunged down into the broken hollow, my attention was drawn from my new residence to the peril which endangered life and limb at every step. The
driver, however, was well used to such roads, and, steering us dexterously between the black stumps, at length drove up, not to the door, for which there was none to the house, but to the open space from which that absent but very necessary appendage had been removed. Three young steers and two heifers, which the driver proceeded to drive out, were quietly reposing on the floor….I begged the man to stay until [my husband] arrived, as I felt terrified at being alone in this wild, strange-looking place. He laughed, as well he might, at our fears, and said that he had a long way to go, and must be off; then, cracking his whip … he went his way, and Hannah and myself were left standing in the middle of the dirty floor.”

Susanna also included anecdotes that capture the community humour of life in the bush. For all her disgust at the behaviour of some of her neighbours at logging bees, her prose dances with her love of regional accents and earthy humour when she writes about one that took place on the Moodies' property. One of the Irish settlers who helped at the bee was “Old Wittals … with his low forehead and long nose [who] ate his food like a famished wolf.” A fellow logger was “funning Old Wittals for having eaten seven large cabbages at Mr. Traill's bee, a few days previous. His son, Sol, thought himself as in duty bound to take up the cudgel for his father. ‘Now, I guess that's a lie, anyhow. Father was sick that day, and I tell you he only ate five.'… Malachi Chroak had discovered an old pair of cracked bellows in a corner, which he placed under his arm, and applying his mouth to the pipe, and working his elbow to and fro, pretended that he was playing upon the bagpipes, every now and then letting the wind escape in a shrill squeak from this novel instrument. ‘Arrah, ladies and jintlemen, do jist turn your swate little eyes upon me whilst I play for your iddifications the last illigant tune which my owld grandmother taught me. Och hone! 'tis a thousand pities that such musical owld crathers should be suffered to die, at all at all, to be poked away into a dirthy, dark hole, when their canthles shud be burnin' a-top of a bushel, givin' light to the house.' And here he minced to and fro, affecting the airs of a fine lady.”

Susanna wrote of herself as a wife and mother: there was always a baby in her arms or a child by her side as she faced the challenges of bush life. In a chapter set in the bitterly cold winter of 1837 (“During the month of February, the thermometer often ranged from eighteen to twenty-seven degrees below zero”), she recorded how she coped alone when the roof of her log cabin caught fire. “Large pieces of burning pine began to fall through the boarded ceiling….The children I had kept under a large dresser in the kitchen, but it now appeared absolutely necessary to remove them to a place of safety. To expose the young, tender things to the direful cold was almost as bad as leaving them to the mercy of the fire. At last I hit upon a plan to keep them from freezing. I emptied all the clothes out of a large, deep chest of drawers, and dragged the empty drawers up the hill; these I lined with blankets, and placed a child in each drawer, covering it well over with the bedding, giving to little Agnes the charge of the baby to hold between her knees, and keep well-covered until help should arrive. Ah, how long it seemed coming!”

Roughing It in the Bush
was more than a collection of “events as may serve to illustrate a life in the woods,” as Susanna modestly claimed. It was the dramatic story of her own journey of self-discovery, as she faced the rigours and disorientation of pioneer life. She presented herself as the delicate young lady that she had been when she arrived in Canada, and with whom English readers would identify, rather than the toughened, middle-aged woman who had survived the loss of two children and now lived in a prosperous town. When the hopelessly naive Moodies arrive in the New World, “All was new, strange and distasteful to us; we shrank from the rude, coarse familiarity of the uneducated people among whom we were thrown; and they in return viewed us as innovators, who wished to curtail their independence by expecting from them the kindly civilities and gentle courtesies of a more refined community.” Susanna dwelt on her incompetence as a farmer's wife, her inability to bake bread or organize a bee. She didn't brag about the fact that, before
they all left the woods, Catharine acknowledged her as the best baker of breads and pies in the district.

Susanna carefully reworked the sketches to appeal to English sensitivities, and she gentrified her language: “face” became “countenance,” “bite” became “masticate.” In an 1847 issue of the
Literary Garland,
she had revelled in the gory details of a man who had tried to cut his own throat in a botched suicide attempt, and quoted the words of Ned Layton, the rescuer, directly: “I then saw that it was a piece of the flesh of his throat that had been carried into his windpipe. So, what do I do, but puts in my finger and thumb, and pulls it out, and bound up his throat with my handkerchief … ” But Susanna decided that a British reader wouldn't have the stomach for such a vivid description. In the account of the same incident in
Roughing It in the Bush,
Susanna prudishly remarked: “Layton then detailed some particulars of his surgical practice which it is not necessary to repeat.”

A decade after she had lived through these experiences, Susanna was able to put some distance between herself and her life. She was candid about the hardships of the immigrant life. She explained that Canada was the country for the “industrious working man” who knew how to work the land and could tolerate hardship as he slowly acquired property and prestige that were out of his reach back home. However, she warned, a penniless gentleman with no experience of manual labour could never prosper. Addressing the reader directly, she explained that any gentleman who crossed the Atlantic in order to reestablish social position lost at home would be ruined and disappointed: “If these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from sinking their property, and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house, and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.” She confessed that she and her husband had discovered that sustained effort and faith in God's goodness were no guarantee of success in the backwoods.

Susanna had high expectations for sales of
Roughing It in the Bush.
She deliberately flagged her famous connections by dedicating it as “a simple Tribute of Affection” to “Agnes Strickland, Author of the ‘Lives of the Queens of England.' ”

The London reviews were everything that the Moodies had hoped for. The
Athenaeum
praised the author's ability to present “the dark side of the emigrant's life” without being “needlessly lachrymose.” The
Literary Gazette
admired the author's patience, noble mind and unaffected outlook and recommended the book for its “great originality and interest,” despite its occasional coarseness.
Blackwood's Magazine
carried lengthy extracts, interspersed with lavish praise of the author's moral courage and good humour in the face of adversity and rude neighbours. The magazine beseeched its female readers to “behold one, gently nurtured as yourselves, cheerfully condescending to rudest toils, unrepiningly enduring hardships you never dreamed of.” Bentley quickly ordered a second printing of
Roughing It in the Bush,
paid Susanna an additional fifty pounds and asked her to send him more material to publish. He published further editions in 1854 and 1857.

Within weeks of its appearance in England, a pirated edition of
Roughing It in the Bush
was published in New York. The American publisher, George Putnam, brought out a two-volume version, in which most of the poems were omitted, in his Semi-Monthly Library for Travellers and the Fireside series. The reviewers were equally enthusiastic there. The New York
Albion
praised the book's “obvious stamp of truth.” American writers commented with admiration on the author's bravery in the remote “wilds of Canada,” as though the district Susanna wrote about was in the High Arctic rather than just across Lake Ontario from New York State.

Susanna was buoyed up by her sales. Within a year,
Roughing It in the Bush
was close to outselling one of the all-time bestsellers in nineteenth-century America: Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Chapter 13

Mortification and Madness

I
n 1852, the year that Susanna's
Roughing It in the Bush
and Catharine's
Canadian Crusoes
were published, their sister Agnes Strickland was at the height of her fame in England and grand beyond belief. Whenever Agnes visited her publisher Blackwoods in Edinburgh, “the Scottish papers announce all my arrivals and departures as if I was a Queen myself,” she told Susanna. When she travelled from Reydon to Norwich to make some purchases, the tradesmen begged her to accept without payment any goods she fancied. She was a permanent fixture of gatherings at London's Kensington Palace, where, she gloated, she met “rooms full of lords and ladies.”

Her elaborate costumes were reported in
The Times
: on one occasion she wore a “robe of rich Lyons brocade à l'antique, yellow roses, buds, and foliage, on pale silver-coloured ground,” a long lace train and “double skirts of white glacé silk, edged with mauve velvet and covered with a
tunic and deep flounce of Honiton point lace.” Fearless of gilding the lily, Agnes wore both a tiara and a plume of white ostrich feathers on her head. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, sought out this fearsomely well-upholstered figure at a Park Lane
soirée
to compliment her on her “graceful and romantic pen.” Clearly, Thomas Strickland's mercantile origins had been left far behind: at a Scottish gathering of peers, Agnes was suffused with snobbish relief to see “an assembly of genuine nobles of gentle blood, no dirty cotton-spinners or stock-jobbers.” And the market for royal biographies appeared bottomless. Now that
The Queens of England
series was completed, she and Elizabeth had already embarked on another set of carefully researched hagiographies,
The Lives of the Queens of Scotland
, which appeared between 1850 and 1859.