Sisters in the Wilderness

by Charlotte Gray

  I found the answers to these questions in three recently published volumes of their personal papers held in various archives (principally in the National Archives of Canada and the National Library). In the unvarnished prose of old journals and yellowing letters, a different picture of each sister emerges. I learned of Susanna’s quiet competence, even as she put on paper her sense of helplessness in the woods. I read about the disasters and family trials behind the brave face Catharine always wore. I realized how much the sisters relied on one another, as a link with the Old Country and as a source of support for each other’s creative efforts. I understood the importance to Catharine and Susanna of a third sister, the intimidating Agnes Strickland, in England. The sisters came alive for me, as flesh-and-blood women at the centres of their families. There is much more to both of them than they ever allowed their own readers to know.

  Most of all, I began to understand the stamina, talent and determination that allowed two English ladies to overcome the hardships of pioneer life and leave a powerful legacy to Canadian culture. They never achieved their hopes of joining the Canadian land-owning cream, but over the past 150 years, they have successfully forced themselves to the top of our literary milk-pot.

  Sisters in the Wilderness

  Prelude

  February 1834

  Tall, dense pine trees loomed over the Moodies, blocking any glimpse of the night sky, as they wearily clambered down from the heavy, horse-drawn sleigh. Susanna, John and their two little girls were exhausted, hungry and chilled to the bone. For eighteen hours they had lurched across packed snow and frozen swamp and through thick, silent forest. Now they had finally arrived at the home of Susanna’s sister Catharine Parr Traill and her husband Thomas, just north of the little Upper Canadian town of Peterborough. Golden light flooded out of the log cabin’s open door: Susanna stumbled towards its promise of warmth and shelter—and reunion with her beloved sister.

  Was it really less than two years since the sisters had last seen each other? It felt like half a lifetime. Back then, the two young women had been rising stars in the lively literary world of Regency London. They had more than enough talent and education to become serious writers: only the straitened circumstances of their own family, and their husbands’ poor prospects, had held them back. Persuaded by their husbands that they would have a better future in the colonies, they had said goodbye to each other on the pebble beach of Southwold, in 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

  The 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 sixth wife, with whom there was a vague ancestral link) in 1802 and Susanna in 1803. Two sons subsequently took their places in the nursery—Samuel in 1805 and Thomas in 1807—but they were never players in their sisters’ nursery games.

  Thomas Strickland didn’t really enjoy the bustle of Rotherhithe: his heart lay in his library, not his wharves. He took particular pride in the books and memorabilia once owned by Newton that his first wife had brought into his household. And he suffered from gout—an excruciatingly painful complaint. For health reasons, and with hopes of bettering his social position, Thomas decided in 1803 to leave the city and move to Suffolk.

  Thomas Strickland’s decision to move to a bucolic county north of London and reinvent himself as a country squire was typical of his age—although it probably didn’t seem so to him. In 1803, the country was simmering uncomfortably under George III, the third inadequate Hanoverian monarch in a row. It was also fighting one of the greatest enemies it had ever faced: France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, whose forces challenged the Duke of Wellington on land and Admiral Horatio Nelson at sea. But the preceding century had seen changes in Britain that had shaken the traditions of centuries. Brilliant prime ministers such as Robert Walpole and William Pitt had successfully transferred power from hereditary aristocrats to elected representatives; demand for an extension of the franchise beyond wealthy landowners was starting to build. Robert Clive’s victories in India had established British rule there, and the American War of Independence had eliminated British control of thirteen colonies. There had been a rush of inventions, such as Richard Arkwright’s water-powered spinning machine and James Watt’s steam engine. In 1785 The Times was established; in 1802, the English physicist John Dalton introduced atomic theory into chemistry. As Britain embarked on the new century, it was alive with new thinking, new intellectual movements and a new sense of possibility. It was on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, which would make Brit
ain the wealthiest nation in the world. The social strata were shifting, and there was new room for upward mobility.

  In Suffolk, there was a surprising turnover of estates at the top of the social hierarchy as members of a new class—nouveaux riches—bought up old manor houses. The industrialist John Crowley, who owned England’s largest ironworks, in County Durham, two hundred miles north of London, had set himself up in a mansion in the sleepy old Suffolk village of Barking. One of London’s richest malt distillers, Samuel Kent, had settled into a stately hall on the River Lark at Fornham St. Genevieve. The district in which Thomas Strickland decided to set himself up was the Waveney Valley in eastern Suffolk. By late 1803, he was renting Stowe House, a Georgian manor on a hill overlooking the town of Bungay.

  Suffolk was attractive to people like Thomas Strickland because the comfortably rounded bulge of land jutting into the North Sea has always been one of the most beautiful corners of England. Suffolk shares with Norfolk, its northern neighbour, vistas of flat fields, scattered villages and meandering streams. The gentle features and wide skies of Suffolk at the time of the Stricklands are best captured on the canvases of two of England’s greatest landscape painters, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Curlews endlessly wheel round in the sky; silvery light slants onto still water; yellow fields are spangled with the brilliant vermilion of poppies. In 1803, the county’s most dramatic features were man-made and on a human scale. Inland, there were medieval flint-and-stone churches, and brick windmills with creaking sails. Along the coastline, there were lighthouses to warn North Sea fishing fleets and collier brigs of the shifting sandbanks on the East Anglian shore. Even today, little has changed—Suffolk prides itself on the way it ambles through history, at least a century behind the rest of England.

  Five of the Strickland daughters were born by the time the family moved to Suffolk, and Susanna arrived within the first few months. In later years, Catharine was to recall Stowe House as “our Eden,” and to compress memories of every season and childhood delight into her ecstatic descriptions of the house and grounds. “The banks of the stream were lined with sweet purple violets, primroses, and the little sun-bright celandine: from this slender streamlet we children drank the most delicious draughts from Nature’s own chalice, the hollow of our hands, or sipped its pure waters, like the fairies we read of, from the acorn cups that strewed the grass… . Later on there was a good store of wild strawberries, which we gathered and strung upon a stalk of grass to carry home to our mother as a peace-offering for torn frocks and soiled pinafores.”

  During the years at Stowe House the children were happily enclosed in two overlapping but self-contained worlds—their own close-knit family, and the timeless routines of rural Suffolk. During the mornings, they congregated in the brick-paved parlour for lessons. The elder children acted out scenes from Shakespeare, or studied Greek and Latin under their father’s supervision, while the younger children were taught to read by their mother. Elizabeth and Thomas were strict parents who insisted that their children’s education be well grounded in history, geography, mathematics and the theology and morality of the Church of England. Disobedience was punished by solitary confinement, without dinner. Thomas wanted his daughters as well as his sons to be self-reliant. His fourth daughter, Jane, never forgot his lessons. “‘Persevere and you must succeed,’ was one of his maxims,” she recalled years later. “‘God helps those who help themselves.’ When his right hand was disabled by gout, he used his left hand to write with—such was our father.”

  After their mornings in the schoolroom, the Stricklands spent the afternoons around the garden and farmland, or accompanied their parents on local errands. With their mother, they would visit Bungay, a market town with a romantic ruined castle on the hill above it. Every Thursday, there was a lively market in the cobbled square by the seventeenth-century Butter Cross, a local stone monument. The town had a full complement of artisans who kept the local economy going, and whose workshops were irresistible draws for curious children. Harness-makers, wheelwrights, brick-makers, potters, basket-weavers, coopers, blacksmiths and farriers—the young Stricklands could watch their carriage horses being shod, or their cooking pots repaired, by men who had learned their skills from their fathers. They could eavesdrop on the old men who gathered in the sunshine for a “mardle” (as a casual chat was known locally) or count the grain sacks being unloaded for grinding in one of the local windmills.

  With their father and his manservant, Lockwood, the children might set off on fishing expeditions along the River Waveney. The Waveney, which loops lazily around the town of Bungay and is still the haunt of otters, snipe and duck, was a favourite destination two hundred years ago for local eel-fishers. Their method of catching their prey was called “eelbabbing” and was unique to this little pocket of England. Worms spiced with a tasty mixture of dung were threaded onto a special kind of wool. The wool line was then fixed to a rod and dropped in the Waveney’s shallow waters, where an eel might snatch at the worm and get the wool caught in its teeth. Practised babbers swore by this technique, which saved them the slimy, frustrating job of removing a hook from the eel’s mouth. Thomas Strickland and his children would walk down to the Waveney in the late evening to watch the babbers at work. But Thomas himself was a rod-and-fly gentleman, whose fishing bible was Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler. He would read aloud passages to Catharine when he took her fishing, and his first-edition copy of Walton’s classic would become one of her most treasured possessions.

  Thomas was often incapacitated by gout, and his wife would be too busy nursing him to pursue her children’s education. Then the girls had to amuse themselves. “In the long winter evenings we gathered around the fire and the elder ones would tell long stories bearing upon some point of history but embellished according to the invisible genius of their fertile minds,” Catharine recalled years later. “These improvised histories were continued night after night. New characters introduced and new events. And often this amusement gave place to the reading aloud [of] Shakespeare’s tragedies …” As the logs flamed in the stone fireplace and kept at bay the darkness beyond the hearth, Agnes Strickland—who, though the second eldest, was the dominant and by far the most theatrical of the brood—kept her five sisters enthralled as she recited from memory Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” or John of Gaunt’s stirring invocation from Richard II: “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle …” Or else she stage-managed a whole production, with herself—tall and deep-voiced—as male lead and Sarah, the prettiest of the sisters, as Ophelia, Juliet or Viola.

  It was an extraordinarily intense family of literary youngsters: they spent far more time with each other than with any other children and had all read more by the age of ten than most girls of their era and class read in a lifetime. Of the six sisters, five would become published authors. In later years, Catharine found the comparison of the Stricklands with another literary sisterhood of the nineteenth century irresistible. “Began reading for the second time the life of Charlotte Bronte,” she wrote in her journal when she was fifty-eight. “There is so much in this book that reminds me of our own early years—were I to write a history of the childhood of the Strickland family …how many things there would be that would remind the reader of the early days of the Brontes.”

  During these years, Thomas Strickland’s investments continued to prosper. He still owned property in Rotherhithe which yielded some income, and he had also entered into a partnership with a coach-maker in Norwich, the chief city in Norfolk. He bought a townhouse within the city walls, on a cobbled street near the lovely medieval church of St. Giles. And in 1808 he purchased a gentleman’s residence eighteen miles southeast of Bungay, about a mile from the Suffolk coast. During a particularly cold spell in January, the Stricklands left Bungay and moved to Reydon Hall.

  The girls revelled in the well-stocked library and dusty attics of Reydon Hall, Suffolk.

  Reydon Hall is a solid brick manor still conside
red one of the most attractive houses in the county. Built in 1682, it has mullioned windows, fancy curved Dutch gables on its third floor and rambling grounds. At the front of the house during the Stricklands’ ownership was a broad sweep of driveway hidden from the road by a thick stand of oak, chestnut and ash trees; to the rear, extensive lawns dotted with old sycamore trees gave way to the Reydon woods, owned by the Earl of Stradbroke. Inside the Hall there were three spacious reception rooms, several bedrooms, a stone-flagged kitchen and servants’ quarters. The writing desk of General Wolfe, hero of the Plains of Abraham, took pride of place in the drawing room; how Thomas had acquired this treasure is uncertain. In the best tradition of noble mansions, the Hall even boasted a third-floor garret reputed to house a ghost called “Old Martin.” The bedrooms were low-ceilinged and pokey, and there were constant problems with a leaky roof. Nonetheless, its old brick glowed with warmth, and even today, after countless additions and renovations, its beautiful scalloped gables and elaborate double chimneys lend Reydon Hall considerable grace. The house affirmed that Thomas Strickland had arrived in Suffolk society.

  Thomas and Elizabeth now divided their time between Reydon Hall and Norwich, where their two sons went to the fee-paying Norwich Grammar School. They frequently took their two oldest girls with them, leaving the younger ones at home in the charge of the servants. “Reading was our chief resource,” Catharine would recall in later years. “We ransacked the library for books, we dipped into old magazines of the last century…. We tried history, the drama, voyages and travels, of which latter there was a huge folio. We even tried ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ We wanted to be very learned…” They combed through back numbers of the Astrologer’s Magazine for tales of witchcraft and ghosts, which they then retold with great relish to the cook and housemaid until the latter were convinced they would meet Old Martin on the stairs. To relieve the boredom of dull, dark winter days, the two youngest girls decided to write a novel for children. Careless of old Martin’s ghost, in the dusty attic they unearthed a supply of paper in a chest with massive brass hinges and locks—left behind, according to family legend, by a young Indian prince who had been sent to England as an ambassador to the Royal Court.