I Bless You in My Heart: Selected Correspondence of Catharine Parr Traill

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

Catharine Parr Traill was a remarkable woman. After emigrating from
Britain to Upper Canada in 1832, she and her husband, Thomas Traill,
endeavored to settle on various sites north of Port Hope, especially in
the Rice Lake area—if “settle” is not too strong a word to
describe an existence that hovered for decades on the brink of
destitution. Nine children were born to them; two died in infancy. Their
farmhouse burned down in 1857, and Thomas Traill, suffering from
depression, died two years later. With the help of her brother, Samuel
Strickland, Traill established herself and her younger children in a
house in Lakefield, where she lived until her death in 1899, at the age
of 97. Throughout her long life she wrote, her first publication
appearing in 1818 and her last in 1895. Now she is probably best
remembered for The Backwoods of Canada and The Canadian Settler’s
Guide, but in the 19th century Canadian Wild Flowers brought
considerable attention and Studies of Plant Life prestige. She made very
little money from her writing, but a pittance was always welcome in her
usually straitened circumstances.

Traill bore the trials of life with fortitude, in part because she
possessed an unusually sunny temperament: “I think that I have a happy
faculty of forgetting past sorrows and only remembering the
pleasures,” she wrote to her friend Frances Stewart in 1851. But her
temperament was fortified by strong Christian beliefs that were closely
allied with her love of nature: “the sight of green things is life to
me,” she wrote in 1888, and she thought Izaak Walton’s The Compleat
Angler was the book “that helped to form my love of Nature and
Nature’s God.”

The editors have selected 136 of the 500 surviving letters of Catharine
Parr Traill, providing introductions and endnotes as well as essential
genealogies of the burgeoning Traill, Strickland, and Moodie families.
The information they provide elucidates but does not overwhelm the text.
And what splendid letters these are. Traill assuredly possessed a
“warm and generous nature,” but she could be tart in referring to an
unsatisfactory relative and very tart indeed in her reference to
publishers.