Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Sisters in the Wilderness is a worthy successor to Mrs. King (1997),
Charlotte Gray’s biography of Isabel Mackenzie King. Well written and
well researched, but not too heavily freighted with scholarship, it
makes a fine read for the general reader.

This dual biography is successful partly because it has an absorbing
story to tell—a story made the more dramatic because of the profound
differences in its leading characters. Catharine and Susanna were born
Stricklands, and the most formative part of their childhood was spent at
Reydon Hall, a 17th-century manor house in Suffolk. They and their four
sisters and two brothers were educated at home by their parents. Their
father suffered a severe business reverse and died in 1818. Five of the
sisters had been writing to entertain themselves and each other, but
from 1818 on their writing assumed a serious economic purpose.

The sisters were very different. Catharine had an unusually sunny
disposition and perhaps for that reason was her father’s favorite. He
took her on fishing expeditions and walks, teaching her botany along the
way. She became, and remained, a keen naturalist. Susanna was more
tempestuous. She took pleasure in declaring that she was madly in love
with Napoleon Bonaparte. When he escaped from Elba, she “whooped for
joy.” Her father was outraged.

It was in the process of attaching themselves to literary life in
London that the sisters met their future husbands. Susanna fell deeply
in love with John Dunbar Moodie, and they were married in 1831; little
more than a year later, Catharine married Thomas Traill, Moodie’s
friend and, like him, a former officer and Orkneyman. Whereas Traill
suffered from depressions (which intensified with the passage of time),
Moodie was all too sanguine and greatly given to making bad decisions.

Their prospects in England after the Napoleonic wars were nil, so both
couples decided to immigrate to Upper Canada, where there was free land
for half-pay officers. The trouble was, neither Moodie nor Traill had
the least aptitude for pioneering. They and their growing families lived
lives of near-destitution. Even the Moodies’ escape to Belleville,
where John Moodie was appointed sheriff, was far from trouble-free.
Despite adversity, the sisters wrote on. Their fortitude is deeply
impressive, even though Susanna never did suffer in silence.