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Roughing It in Michigan and Upper Canada: Caroline Kirkland and Susanna Moodie MICHAEL A. PETERMAN IN HIS 1965 introduction to Caroline Kirkland's A New Home—Who'll Follow? (1839), William S. Osborne observes that, "probably, Mrs. Kirkland had no equals in her day in her particular area of writing" (24). That area of writing, the collection of loosely chronological sketches drawn from personal experience in a remote frontier environment and directed at a genteel, mostly female audience as an amusement and a warning, holds an important place in the development of literary realism in nineteenth-century America. In Osborne's words, "actual residence in the West had made her a realist; and in the first book about her Western experiences she had effectively destroyed the romantic conception of frontier life and brought vigor and strength to American fiction too long given over to sentimentalism, high adventure, and Gothic sensationalism" (15). More recently, and from a feminist perspective, Annette Kolodny has written that, by means of her "gritty realism," Kirklandwas"the direct progenitor of that bold new direction in American letters" (155). Had Osborne looked northward to what wasUpper Canada (in the eighteen-thirties, Canada West), he would have found Caroline Kirkland's 'equal.' In fact, he need only have looked to NewYork, where inJune 1852 George Putnam published Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in theBush. The two-volume work, which Putnam had pirated from Richard Bentley of London, was edited for its American audience by Charles F.Briggs, the first editor of Putnam's Magazine and a friend of Mrs. Kirkland's. That thin connection is as close as I have been able to come in directly linking the two authors. Osborne does not mention Moodie either in his edition of A New Home or his Twayne study of Kirkland; nor does he recall any reference 120 by Kirkland to Moodie or her sister Catharine Parr Traill, whose The Backwoods of Canada (1836) preceded A New Home by three years.1 In all of Moodie's (and, for that matter, Traill's) writing and extant correspondence , Kirkland's name never comes up. Thus, despite the fact that their most important books—A New Home and Roughing It in the Bush—bear many striking similarities, there is no direct evidence to confirm that Kirkland influenced Moodie or that they were aware of each other's efforts. However, several reviewers of Roughing It in theBush in both England and the United States were quick to note certain likenesses.2 To be sure, various newspapers that Moodie might have read—the conservative Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, for example, and the reformist Upper Canada Herald (Kingston)—did publish excerpts from both the very popular A New Home in 1839-40 and its sequel, Forest Life, in 1842. The Herald is her most likely source, since she and her husband were reform supporters by 1839-40; in fact, once on the job in Belleville, Sheriff John Moodie wrote occasionally to that paper to offer his side of particular controversies.3 But as "The Science of Borrowing" appeared there on 5 November 1839—that is, before Susanna Moodie had left the Douro backwoods —it is difficult to make a case for influence in that instance. In contrast, "Recollections of Land Fever" did appear in the Herald on 13 October 1840, when she was settled in Belleville. Not to be discounted as well is the possibility that certain Kirkland sketches appeared in Peterborough and Belleville newspapers of those years; however, because these papers have not survived, no evidence is available.4 Thus, while circumstances suggest that Moodie might have read at least one or two of Kirkland 's reprinted sketches, there is no concrete proof that such was the case. But while direct influence is always a matter of literary interest, comparison of A New Home and Roughing It in the Bush encourages other consequential recognitions. First, it allows us to observe that literary history, narrowly viewed along nationalistic lines, can neglect and even erase important and shared responses across the Canadian/American border.5 Second, it generates awareness of the many similarities in the experience of the frontier and of the bush, forest, backwoods, or wilderness (depending upon geography or euphemistic preference) for women in both Upper Canada and Michigan at virtually the same historical moment. To read both books is to realize, for instance, the devastating effect of the depression of the late eighteen-thirties, particularly on people living at some remove from centres...

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