Sisters in Two Worlds: A Visual Biography of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill [Hardcover]

“Something gathers up the fragments; Nothing is lost,” Catharine Parr Traill wrote those lines in Pearls and Pebbles, the very last publication of her life. This book, Sisters in Two Worlds, gives abundant supporting evidence. Described on its title page as “a visual biography”, it is certainly that, and any report given on it must include acknowledgement of the visual aspects of its production. It is not often that a book displays such a happy combination of illustrative material, photographs of its settings, and relevant historic artefacts. It celebrates in a unique and complete way the lives and fortunes of the Strickland sisters, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, who came to Upper Canada as settlers when they were young women and lived their long, productive lives there, largely in the Peterborough/Rice Lake area. We are also kept informed about the fortunes of their brother, Samuel, who had emigrated some years before their arrival in 1832, and of their sister, ! Agnes, who with the other members of their large family remained at Reydon Hall in Suffolk, England, achieving notable financial and personal success with her multiple volumes of the Lives of the Queens of England.
Susanna Moodie is known best for her Roughing it in the Bush, a book that has never been completely out of the public eye since its publication in 1852. Moodie was a prolific writer of poetry and novels throughout her long life. Catharine Parr Traill is known best for her Plant Life in Canada, the text accompanying Canadian Wild Flowers, drawn and coloured by her niece, Agnes Fitzgibbon, and The Backwoods of Canada, a collection of letters written home early in the Traill’s experience as settlers and published in 1836.
In the 1960s as our centennial approached and enthusiasm for all things Canadian flowered, Susanna and Catharine were very much a part of the awakening attention to our literary past. Faculty members in the proliferating new universities quickly appropriated a host of individuals as subjects for teaching and research. Michael Peterman was one such scholar (and he has never been without companions in research-among them Carl Klinck, and, currently, Elizabeth Hopkins and Carl Ballstadt). Through the intervening decades he has retained his interest and broadened and deepened his research. He is superbly qualified to write this book, surely a definitive telling of the Moodie and Traill story, and also the book that in a real sense guarantees the sisters classic status in any account of the literature of Canada.
Both women had achieved a certain reputation as writers before they came to Canada. Their father had died young. The family was left with meagre funds, and they begun submitting stories and poems for publication as very young adults. These were the years of a speedily growing reading public and a quickly expanding band of authors to satisfy it-what the editor of one influential periodical, Blackwoods, called “the swarm that came out with the Annuals.” Catharine came to Canada eagerly. She was the wife of Thomas Traill, a former army officer. She was also the beneficiary of her brother Sam’s experience. Sam had settled in Canada some years earlier, and became the owner of a prosperous farm and the father of a growing family. The Traills chose to take up the land to which they were entitled as officer-settlers-close to Sam’s-and from the start they profited from his advice and proximity. By contrast, Susanna did not share John Dunbar Moodie’s enthusiasm for emigrating and her ! early experiences did nothing to reassure her. Moodie was by nature a speculator, and in Canada he had bad luck. Various schemes which he adopted turned out badly from the start. For instance, they found the house on the land they bought inhabited by a tenant who could not be ousted for some months. They had no choice but to live in an adjoining shack. Moodie then bought steamboat stock, but that investment was a failure as well. Eventually, they moved closer to the Traills, but they continued to live in poverty and discomfort.
The Rebellion of 1837 finally marked the slow beginning of a turning point in the Moodies’ fortunes, but for Susanna it meant long periods with all the responsibilities of family and land as her husband joined the militia immediately and remained in the queen’s service for some time. In desperation she appealed to Governor George Arthur for help. The governor came through: Moodie was named the sheriff of Hastings County and the family moved out of the bush to the county town, Belleville. After their early years of relative good luck, the Traills too endured various reversals, the most serious of which was Thomas Traill’s declining health, both physical and mental. He was prey to depressions and there were many periods when he was incapacitated. Meanwhile their family grew, and at times Catharine barely managed to feed and clothe their threadbare and hungry children. She had made firm friends and was on call many times as a midwife. Her friends did their best to help, but the! re were many bleak years until one by one the children grew up and were able to assist their parents.
Both Susanna and Catharine continued with their writing all their lives: they were writers by training and talent and whatever they made from their efforts was always needed in their families’ long struggle for security. This is a story of pioneer struggles and bitter deprivation, but its telling is relieved and lightened by the book’s visual material. Hugh Brewster, the book’s designer, has produced a wonderfully varied text. Photographs by Hugh and Ian Brewster record the beauties of the surrounding countryside, and an abundance of photographs of long-ago watercolours and historic mementoes adorn the book’s pages. In total, it is a like a museum of Strickland-Moodie-Traill lore that both demands and repays close attention.
Charlotte Gray, whose Sisters in the Wilderness was a successful precursor of this volume, adds considerably to its overall authority. Michael Peterman’s writing of the narrative complements the illustrations gathered here and placed so skilfully. One of its most enjoyable features is its well-planned interruptions of the story for purposes of introducing and explaining important individuals and happenings in the sisters’ lives. For instance, the rebellion of 1837 - 38, which took both Moodie and Traill away from their burgeoning families and responsibilities, is the subject of one such informative insertion. Far from detracting from the narrative, it and its accompanying pictures of Mackenzie “the Firebrand” and his ragtag troops add depth and interest to the story.
Michael Peterman’s text combines complete authority and grace. He concludes with affection and a profound respect for the sisters and their large families. The book also induces both pride in, and appreciation for, the land: tough and unyielding at first, and so unlike the England of the sisters’ memories, it nevertheless became the place that nourished and offered a home to all the generations of their descendants.
Clara Thomas (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

Containing two hundred colour and black-and-white images, many of them never-before published, this extraordinary book chronicles the lives of two exceptional and inspirational women: sisters, writers, pioneers, and forces of the Canadian imagination.

“These two women exert a timeless fascination . . . [their] story reminds us, as Canadians, of where we have come from and how far we have travelled.”
—Charlotte Gray, in the introduction to Sisters in Two Worlds.

Their childhood was spent in a manor house in the Suffolk countryside. As aspiring young authors, they attended literary evenings in the drawing rooms of Georgian London. But in 1832 Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill crossed the Atlantic to embark on new lives in the backwoods of Upper Canada where they struggled to survive and raise their families in a strange and often hostile world. By the light of homemade candles, Susanna and Catharine wrote about their experiences, producing such enduring classics as Roughing it in the Bush and The Backwoods of Canada. And Catharine’s beautifully illustrated books on Canadian plants and wildflowers were the first of their kind.

Sisters in Two Worlds recreates the remarkable lives of these two pioneering writers. Its absorbing narrative is complemented by modern colour photographs of the places they knew, combined with archival images, paintings, letters, and family artifacts. Written by Canada’s foremost Moodie/Traill scholar, this visual biography is an informative new look at two of this country’s seminal writers and a remarkable tapestry of life in early Canada.