Sisters in the Wilderness

Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill is a 1999 biography of two pioneering nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian writers, by British-Canadian author Charlotte Gray. Moodie and Traill were born in England, two of the five Strickland sisters who would eventually earn literary fame in Victorian England. While their sisters continued to enjoy lives of relative wealth and elegance, Moodie and Traill emigrated to Canada with their husbands in 1832. Their accounts of pioneer life in the harsh Canadian landscape became founding documents of the Canadian frontier experience, creating a rift between Moodie and Traill and their genteel sisters back home. Gray, herself an English immigrant to Canada, attempts to reconstruct the real lives underpinning the sisters’ autobiographical writing.

Catharine and Susanna were the youngest of eight children born to Thomas and Elizabeth Strickland. The Stricklands were poor but genteel, and all the Strickland children were thoroughly educated and well read. Gray compares the social status of the Stricklands to the Bennett family in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Five of the Strickland daughters and one son would eventually publish books.

The Strickland sisters first turned to writing in order to make money. Catharine was the first of the siblings to publish a book when she was just sixteen: a collection of stories for children called The Tell Tale: an original collection of moral and amusing stories. She went on to publish nearly a book a year, concentrating on morally-improving stories for children. Her sister Susanna began writing romance stories for popular magazines. She also became involved in the anti-slavery movement, transcribing the story of former Caribbean slave Mary Prince. Meanwhile, their sister Agnes published first poetry and then history books: she was soon on her way to literary stardom.



All five sisters seemed destined to remain spinsters, until Susanna received a proposal from the handsome retired military man John Moodie, who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Soon afterward, Catharine married his friend, Lieutenant Thomas Traill, with encouragement from Susanna (and in the face of objections from the rest of her family).

The Traills emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832, with the Moodies following shortly afterward. Gray dives into the historical context to explain why even relatively genteel English people were driven to make the arduous transatlantic journey. Although the Traills and the Moodies were wealthy enough to afford a comfortable passage, the journey was still a long and difficult one.

Emigration did not solve the families’ financial worries, however. While some English emigrants thrived (including one of the Strickland brothers), bad luck and financial mismanagement landed the Moodies and then the Traills in debt. Both sisters moved frequently, as they sought better opportunities and to evade creditors. For a while, they lived near one another, spending a great deal of time together, but financial pressures soon separated them again. Both sisters buried children in the soil of the New World.



They resumed writing to relieve some of the financial pressures. However, the sisters found that their position in the colonial backwoods made even this difficult. Their publishers were based in England, and they relied on their sisters and their agents to place their books. Publication was delayed, and their royalties were trimmed by middlemen.

Catharine’s 1836 memoir, The Backwoods of Canada, is a collection of letters, journal entries and essays describing life in the new colony: the natural world, the lives of the settlers, and relations with the indigenous people. Susanna’s 1852 Roughing It in the Bush was framed as a “guide” to English people contemplating emigration: the book aims to disabuse readers of the false ideas peddled by shipping agents. She focuses on the hardships of life and the immoral behavior of settlers.

Susanna’s book, in particular, was reviewed harshly in England, where critics found it “rude,” “crude,” and “savage.” Susanna was hurt by this reception, but both sisters were more hurt still by the reaction of their sister Agnes. While Susanna and Catharine had been eking out a living in Canada, Agnes had become modestly wealthy and quite famous for her biographical Lives of the Queens of England. Agnes’s research had taken her to the homes of the aristocracy and earned her an introduction in exalted social circles. She was horrified that her sisters had publically admitted the hardship and poverty of their Canadian lives. The rift between the sisters was never fully healed.



Neither Susanna nor Catharine’s lives ever became much easier. They remained poor and struggling until they died. The opening of Canadian publishing houses made the publication process easier when the writers were older, but the new houses could not afford to pay their authors well. However, both women became famous in Canada, and both forged themselves an important place in Canadian history, to which Gray pays tribute:

“Their most important books are still in print. More than a century has passed since the sister's deaths, but plenty of contemporary Canadians have shared the feelings they captured on paper about emigration, and their ambivalent relationship with a landscape both majestic and savage. Every new Canadian who thinks longingly of "home" and every brave adventurer who sets off into the bush, brushing off black-flies and marveling at nature, is following in the sister's footsteps.”