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Explanatory Notes A ll explanatory notes are referenced first by page number and then by the line on the page in which it can be found (i.e. 1.5). LG refers to serialization in The Literary Garland (Montreal, 1851); RB, to the Richard Bentley edition (London, 1854), and DD, to the American edition by DeWitt and Davenport (New York, 1854). volume i chapter i: 5.9 Josey’s age: here noted as “three months” in concurrence with LG. In Bentley the typo of “three years” was introduced and later perpetuated in DD. In fact, Catherine Mary Josephine Moodie was born on 14 February 1832. The story itself begins in late April or early May of that year. 5.13 “turned Quaker”: The Society of Friends, more commonly known as Quakers, was a Protestant Nonconformist movement that began in England in the early 1650s and sought to be separate from Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. Members were sworn to keep peaceful and non-confrontational relations, hence John Lyndsay’s amused allusion to the Quaker habit of offering indirect modes of response to direct questions. Susanna Strickland had a particular Quaker friend, Allen Ransome of Ipswich, who appears here as Adam Mansel. She was thus familiar with a number of linguistic and social habits of the Quakers as well as their commitment to the abolition of slavery. 6.35 “dear friends”: Little is known of Susanna Strickland’s close female friends other than Laura Harral who died in 1830. There were several, among them Mary Parnell (called Mary Grey in LG) and Miss Gooding, who may well be the same person. Moodie in fact dedicated Flora Lyndsay to “her attached friend,” Miss Gooding of Cromer, in the County of Norfolk. A letter from John Moodie to Susanna (May 1832) reports on gifts he was buying for family and close friends while he was in London on business. He was “quite puzzled what to buy for little Dab-chick’s Godmother Mary”; he also refers to her as “dear Goody” 290 Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life (Letters of Love and Duty: The Correspondence of Susanna and John Moodie [1993]), p. 30. 7.8 “the legacy left you by your aunt”: In response to a letter from John Moodie, Susanna’s widowed mother, Elizabeth Strickland, gave her permission for him to marry Susanna, adding that her only financial expectation was an eighth part of 6000 pounds to be received “upon the demise of two aged relatives.” See the PHE collection at the National Library of Canada. 7.9 half-pay: Half pay was a retainer and pension for decommissioned British officers based upon previous service. There were no general schemes of retirement in the British services before the mid-1800s. John Moodie claimed his annual half pay on the basis of his services to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. He had served as a Lieutenant in the 21st Northern Fusiliers, a regiment based in Edinburgh, and had been wounded in action in the Netherlands. 7.12 Cape of Good Hope: John Moodie spent most of his decade in South Africa on a farm in the Groote Valley that he and his brother Donald were developing. The youngest son of James Moodie of Hoy in the Orkney Islands, John arrived in the Cape of Good Hope on the Mary in 1819. He and Donald were following the path laid down by their eldest brother Benjamin, who, in 1817, had sailed there with some of the first British settlers, mostly Scot artisans. John Moodie lived on his Groote Valley farm until early 1830 when he returned to England to find a publisher for the book he was writing about his South African adventures and to seek a wife whom he hoped would return there with him. His book, Ten Years in South Africa, was published by Richard Bentley in London but not until 1835. 7.22 TheP[ringles]:ThomasPringle(1789–1834)wasSusanna’smostimportant London literary friend and a strong supporter of her writing. Through Thomas Harral, James Bird or her sister Agnes, Susanna met Thomas Pringle and his wife, Margaret, likely in 1827. Susanna took to heart the attention and advice of “Papa Pringle,” who, as a young man, had emigrated from his native Scotland to South Africa where he eventually became a newspaper and magazine editor in Cape Town. His outspoken views about the unfair laws and treatment imposed upon the indigenous people by white settlers led to his expulsion from the...

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