Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life: A Novel by Susanna Moodie

Critical Introduction

Critical Introduction susanna moodie and flora lyndsay F lora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life (Richard Bentley, 1854) is Susanna Moodie’s prequel to her most famous book, Roughing It in the Bush (Bentley, 1852). It is a lively, though padded, two-volume “novel” in which Moodie (1803–1885) lightly fictionalized her experiences as a young Englishwoman forced by economic circumstances to immigrate to Canada with her husband, John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie (1797–1869) and young daughter Katie. The Lyndsays, as she renamed the family, made their final preparations in the quiet North Sea town of Southwold in Suffolk during the month of May 1832; then, after several unanticipated delays and a month of waiting in Edinburgh, crossed the Atlantic in a small brig, intending to take up their land grant in the backwoods or “bush” country in Upper Canada, north of the town of Peterborough. Flora Lyndsay thus dramatizes the emotional experience of “leaving home” and the beginnings of Susanna Moodie’s personal transformation from emigrant to immigrant, from rural Suffolk girl to Canadian “daughter by adoption,” from fledgling English writer to Canadian social analyst and literary figure.1 While apparently straightforward as a narrative, Flora Lyndsay is a complicated literary performance. Writing nearly twenty years after the events she describes, Moodie produced three different versions of the text in four years, from 1851 to 1854; in each case, she wrote from a slightly altered and more engaged perspective, but always in the third person. Acutely sensitive to the critical and familial responses aroused by Roughing It in the Bush, she made numerous alterations in the narrative as she rewrote it for Bentley, expanding and shaping it first for British readers in 1853 and then for an American audience a year later. At the same time, she was wrestling with journalistic criticisms she received in her newfound role as spokesperson for and about Canada in the early 1850s. For all her feistiness, she was thin-skinned as an author and public figure. Flora Lyndsay has not been republished since the New York firm of DeWitt and Davenport brought out its American edition late in 1854. Nor has it ever been published in book form in Canada. Moreover, it is somewhat surprising that literary and cultural critics in Canada have ignored the novel for the most part, overlooking its close relation to Roughing It in the Bush in thematic and stylistic ways, the wealth of personal details it offers, and the fact that it was xii Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life first published in Canada. Following upon the appearance of Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and its sequel Life in the Clearings (Bentley, 1853), the publication of Flora Lyndsay in England and the United States brought Moodie’s “emigration trilogy” to an abrupt close. Flora Lyndsay appeared at a time when Susanna Moodie’s reputation, highly burnished by the publishing success of Roughing It in the Bush in London, had begun to lose some of its lustre in Britain. Coincidently, however, sales of her books were gaining strength in the competitive American market to the south. A growing number of American readers welcomed both her old-world novels like Mark Hurdlestone; or, the Gold Worshipper (Bentley, 1853) and her autobiographical accounts of life in contemporary British North America.2 As well, by 1855, Canadian readers could readily purchase a copy of the English or American editions of Roughing It in the Bush, Life in the Clearings, or Flora Lyndsay in most colonial bookstores. At her home in Belleville, Canada West, Moodie was troubled by her fading reputation in England. At the same time, she was growing uncomfortable with the notoriety that Roughing It in the Bush had brought upon her. Critical editorials and reviews of that book and Life in the Clearings in Canadian newspapers had embittered her to the extent that, even as Flora Lyndsay was finding its way into the hands of North American readers, she was contemplating putting an end to her career as a writer and, in particular, to her newfound role as a critical interpreter of, and spokesperson for, the northern colony.3 Hence, she complained to her English publisher Richard Bentley in autumn 1853, “[Flora Lyndsay] shall be my last work on Canada. I am sick of the subject, and it awakens ill feelings in others.”4 Her prediction proved accurate. One hundred and fifty years later, Flora Lyndsay remains little recognized. This is a curious situation in the...