Susanna Moodie

Susanna Moodie (1803-1885), British-born Canadian author and pioneer, best known for her literary account of her settlement experience, Roughing It in the Bush (1852).

She was born Susanna Strickland in Bungay, Suffolk, England, but spent most of her childhood near Southwold, Suffolk, where she was educated at home. Following her father’s death in 1818, Strickland, along with four of her sisters, began to write for publication to help with the family’s financial difficulties. In addition to contributing poetry and prose to annuals and periodicals, she wrote a number of children’s books, coauthored Patriotic Songs (1830) with her sister Agnes, and issued Enthusiasm, and Other Poems (1831). She also transcribed two slave narratives, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) and Negro Slavery Described by a Negro (1831).

In 1831 she married John W. D. Moodie. The next year, in a bid to improve their economic prospects, they set sail for Upper Canada (now Ontario). Moodie’s sister, Catharine Parr Traill, also a writer, immigrated to Upper Canada the same year. Upon their arrival, the Moodies settled on a farm near Cobourg, on Lake Ontario. In 1834 they sold the farm and took up land in the backwoods of Douro township. The family moved to the more settled area of Belleville in 1840 when John Moodie became sheriff of Hastings County.

After moving to Upper Canada, Moodie sought outlets for her writing in North America. The Literary Garland, a journal published in Montréal, proved a major vehicle for her writing through the 1840s and an important source of income. She and her husband also edited and wrote for Victoria Magazine, a periodical aimed at the Canadian working class, from 1847 to 1848.

Some of the Canadian sketches she wrote for the Literary Garland were reworked and collected in Roughing It in the Bush, Moodie’s most enduring work. In that book Moodie blurs the boundary between autobiography and fiction, making her own authorial personality central to her descriptions of local characters and customs. Her book is a cautionary tale that warns against the hardships of Canadian settlement, but it also reveals Moodie’s fascination with her pioneer experience. She followed that work with Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853), a volume of sketches that takes up her story from her settlement in Belleville. In the novel Flora Lyndsay (1854), she turned the events of her arrival in Canada into fiction. In the 1850s she also published several more sensational and romantic novels that were set outside of Canada. After her husband’s death in 1869, Moodie joined her son Robert’s household, living with him first in Seaforth, Ontario, and then Toronto.

Two collections of her letters, Susanna Moodie: Letters of a Lifetime (1985) and Letters of Love and Duty (1993), capture a more private Moodie. A number of Canada’s contemporary writers, including Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, and Timothy Findley, have offered their own distinct interpretations of this Canadian pioneer by having her figure in their literary works.