Sisters in the Wilderness Read Free Page A

Suffolk. Then each couple had made their own way across the Atlantic, towards Upper Canada, for a new life in a New World.
    So far, however, the New World had proved more hostile than they had ever imagined. As Susanna huddled in the sleigh throughout that long February day, she wondered whether she would ever be able to carve a comfortable life out of this wilderness, let alone achieve the success as an author she had once dreamed of. “I gazed through tears upon the singularly savage scene around me,” she wrote years later in her most famous book, Roughing It in the Bush , “and secretly marvelled, ‘What brought me here?’” Catharine had found the landscape equally overpowering, admitting in her first Canadian book, The Backwoods of Canada , that “the long and unbroken line of woods … insensibly inspires a feeling of gloom almost touching on sadness.”
    Could these two women ever come to terms with Canada? In 1834,it seemed unlikely. During their first eighteen months in the colony, they had not even managed to see one another. Poor communications, primitive roads, family responsibilities and the relentless daily demands of pioneer farms had kept them apart, although only fifty miles separated them. But now, at least, they would have each other. Close allies since childhood, they would at last be able to share their fears and lift each other’s morale.
    When Susanna appeared in the doorway of her cabin, Catharine rushed to embrace her. Tears sprang to Susanna’s eyes as she heard her sister’s voice and felt Catharine’s arms encircle her. The two young women clung to each other in an explosion of joy. Years later, Susanna wrote: “I never enjoyed more heartily a warm welcome after a long day of intense fatigue, than I did that night of my first sojourn in the backwoods.”

Chapter 1
    New Beginnings
    T he childhood of Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie in the early 1800s was very similar to that of Jane Austen, born a quarter of a century earlier. Like her, they grew up in rural England, with its settled rhythms and reassuring continuity. And like the Austen family in Hampshire, the Stricklands didn’t quite fit into the society of prosperous landowners who were their neighbours in Suffolk. Thomas Strickland, father of Catharine and Susanna, had lifted his family out of the lower reaches of gentility, but failed to slot his children safely into the ranks of East Anglia’s landed gentry. As a result, the Strickland girls, like Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra, felt themselves to be on the margins of county society and became acutely attuned to social nuance. The sense during their childhood of being outsiders affected each of them in different ways.

    Suffolk, in the early nineteenth century, was a county of sleepy villages and medieval churches.
    Neither Thomas nor his wife was native to Suffolk. Susanna’s and Catharine’s father was born in 1758 in London, to a respectable but penniless family that had drifted south from Yorkshire. As a teenager, he joined a shipping company called Hallet and Wells, and he spent most of his early adult life in the east end of the smoky, noisy city. Thomas rose in the firm to become master and sole manager of the Greenland docks near Rotherhithe, and the owner of several properties in the east end of London.
    Thomas Strickland was married in 1789 to Susanna Butt, a grandniece of Sir Isaac Newton, the great English mathematician and astronomer. But the first Mrs. Strickland died in 1790, within a few months of their marriage. Three years later, when he was thirty-five, Thomas Strickland married again, this time to twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Homer. It was a productive match. In the first ten years of marriage, Thomas and Elizabeth had six daughters: Elizabeth (known as Eliza) arrived in 1794, Agnes in 1796, Sarah (known as Thay) in 1798, Jane in 1800, Catharine Parr (named after Henry VIII ’s