Sisters in Two Worlds: A Visual Biography of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (review)

Perhaps only the fascinating pioneer sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, whose literary narratives of bush life have come to stand at the heart of the Canadian mythology, could merit such an extensive ‘visual biography’ as Michael Peterman’s Sisters in Two Worlds. Effectively contrasting the Strickland sisters’ genteel origins with their New World labours, the book traces their journey from a Suffolk country estate to the mosquito-infested, stump-strewn wastes of Upper Canada, where the sisters learned to make clothes, soap, and candles as well as bake bread and cook squirrel in an effort to raise their children and assist their husbands in what were often disastrous farming ventures. In the process, they produced narratives of hardship and survival written with wit, religious faith, and (in Moodie’s case) scathing humour and outrage.

Michael Peterman has long been interested in their writing and lives, having published a critical biography of Moodie entitled Susanna Moodie: A Life (1999) and edited volumes of both writers’ correspondence; he has also published many articles on their works. Still, Sisters in Two Worlds is a departure for him: in its combination of author biography and cultural history, it richly documents in text and pictures the material worlds that shaped the two remarkable women. The pictures and photographs are the major attraction of the book, abundant and beautifully produced, and Hugh Brewster deserves special commendation for his role in editing and designing the collection of images. They include modern-day photographs of significant buildings and places, such as Reydon Hall, the Suffolk estate that established the Strickland family as landed gentry, and the small Anglican church in which Catharine and Thomas Traill were married; contemporary sketches of the Strickland family and acquaintances; maps and scenes of Suffolk landscapes; an illustrated page from the magazine that published Susanna’s first poetry; family and community artifacts such as Catharine’s flower press; and many sketches, paintings, and photographs of Upper Canadian villages and newly cleared bush settlements. Photographs of Susanna and Catharine in old age – and a striking one of John Dunbar – are particularly affecting; and the photo of a page from John Dunbar’s ‘Spiritualist Album,’ in which he recorded happenings at séances, suggests the richness of the documents from which Peterman and Brewster have drawn. If a book of pictures might seem a popular rather than scholarly endeavour – something designed mainly for the coffee table – Peterman also provides a thoroughly researched historical account. Quoting from the sisters’ letters and literary works as well as other contemporary sources, he tells a lucid narrative tracing their precocious childhoods in England, their decision to emigrate, their years of literary success and physical hardship in the New World, and their final years.

The text makes us aware of the courage and resourcefulness it took to leave home and family to start a new life in Upper Canada (even the sharp-tongued Susanna downplayed her hardships in her writing), as well as the shocking differences between the society they abandoned and their wilderness outpost, in which they contended with rude neighbours, unreliable servants, frequent illnesses (especially ague, a malarial fever), severe financial hardship made worse by the economic depression of the mid-1830s, extremes of climate, storms, and bushfires, and much unaccustomed – and often unprofitable – labour. Alternating between their separate stories, Peterman tells of their experiences of settlement (the Moodies initially settled on cleared land in Hamilton Township, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, the Traills forty miles north in Douro Township on an uncleared farm); their family situations (husbands John and Thomas were very different men, John being high-spirited and optimistic, if not always practical, Thomas increasingly debilitated by melancholy); their domestic affairs (Catharine was the more skilled and cheerful settler and initially the more successful writer, though Susanna too, despite her grumbles, learned to cope effectively); and literary activity (Catharine’s writing was practically oriented, often presented...