Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel's Canadian Journal, 1833-1836

Susannah D. Ketchum, a former teacher-librarian at the Bishop Strachan
School in Toronto, serves on the Southern Ontario Library Services
Board.

In March 1833, Lucy and Edmund Peel sailed to Canada, and Lucy began her
Canadian journal, a series of long letters written mostly to her mother,
but also to her sisters and various in-laws. Initially, she wrote almost
daily. Once a month she would close the current epistle and send it off.
These “Letters from Canada” were “recently discovered in a
descendant’s house in Norwich.” The Peels settled in the Eastern
Townships, near Sherbrooke, where Edmund, a half-pay Naval officer,
tried to wrest a profitable farm from the wilderness. Lucy’s letters
detail Edmund’s labors in the fields, the building of their house, her
efforts at upholstering beds and a sofa, her raptures over the
“romantic” scenery, and her trials with domestic help.

Editor John Little, a professor of history at Simon Fraser University
who has published extensively on the history of the Eastern Townships,
provides an introduction, extensive notes, and a short, but very
helpful, listing of “Frequently Mentioned Names.” A sketchy index
and a few, nearly contemporary, black-and-white illustrations are also
included. Strangely, though Little documents many works in his notes,
there is no bibliography.

Part of the Studies in Childhood and Family in Canada series, Love
Strong as Death gives us a fascinating look at the family life of “a
small, privileged sector of [Canadian] society.” It also gives “a
voice to women, a voice that is seldom heard in the official records.”
Despite being a journal, it is succinct and contains surprisingly little
repetition. Students will enjoy comparing it with the writings of
Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, and others of that period.
Lucy’s writing style is reminiscent of Jane Austen’s.