Letters of a Lifetime: Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

Susanna Moodie was already a professional writer when she came to Canada from England in 1832 with her husband and one small baby, entertaining hopes of “independence and comfort.” She came to a life of considerable discomfort and endless struggle for financial independence.

It is not a happy picture that emerges from these pages. After eight years of hardship in farm country and the bush (which she described in her book, Roughing It in the Bush), the family moved to Belleville when Mr. Moodie was made sheriff of Hastings County. Within a year, their house had burned down. These letters contain heartbreaking accounts of family troubles and money problems. Susanna Moodie always seems to have expected the worst and very frequently that’s what she got. Only at the end of her life, when her career was virtually over, did her letters become warm and intimate and even playful.

It is disappointing that no personal correspondence survives from the early years of clearing the bush, but fortunately most of her business letters were written to her English publisher, Richard Bentley, with whom she developed a firm friendship. Many of the last, affectionate letters are to her sister, Catharine Parr Traill.

The editors fill in generous biographical detail so that the sum of the book is a portrait of an extraordinary woman in our history. Susanna Moodie cared passionately about her large family as well as her writing and, in later years, her flower paintings. She was interested in spiritualism and relates some astonishing and prescient dreams. She named her cow Mrs. Powers. But the reader of these letters will never forget that she lived a hard life in a harsh environment.