Broad lands at length they’ll claim,
They’ll call the new possession
By some familiar name.
Those of Agnes’s friends who read her brother’s book would know that the good major was the owner of “broad lands” on the other side of the ocean. Unlike his sister, who had written about “painful experience in a distant land,” Sam lived a thoroughly civilized life and was a credit to the Strickland name. Sam’s book did well. Bentley’s Miscellany liked the work’s “rough, hearty, genuinely English tone.” The Spectator thought its “Robinson Crusoe character” splendid.
In Belleville, Susanna was shocked by Agnes’s stinging reproaches. “Could I have foreseen her reception of [the dedication],” Susanna wrote to Richard Bentley in London, “thousands would not have induced me to place it there. She has wounded my feelings so severely… that it is to me a perfect eye sore in front of my unfortunate book.” Anger soon took the place of hurt. Susanna was furious that Agnes had dismissed Roughing It in the Bush in such a snobbish fashion. She thought Sam’s book was pretentious and boring. “My brother is dreadfully ridiculed by the Canadian press by adopting that absurd Major.” And she was outraged when Sam, on his return to Canada, boasted of his royalties. Susanna was a fighter, and she thought up a nasty little scheme to sabotage Agnes. She suggested to Richard Bentley that he find an author in England to write a biographical work entitled “The Memoirs of Royal Favourites.” (Such a book would be direct competition for her sister’s biographies. Bentley, who was in the curious position of being both Sam’s and Susanna’s publisher, did not take up the suggestion.)
Susanna was particularly incensed because Agnes, she suspected, had exerted her influence over many of the London reviewers. “Hers is a ready and a clever pen,” she wrote to Bentley. “It is more than probable, that to her, both my brother and I, are indebted, he for the good, I for the bad reviews of our respective works.” Most of the reviews of Roughing It in the .Bush in London’s influential literary papers were in fact very positive. But this was the first time since 1830, when Susanna had published her lengthy poem “Enthusiasm,” that, instead of turning out formulaic pap, she had poured out her own heart and soul to her readers in England, and she was abnormally sensitive to criticism. The most negative London review was in the Observer, which took exception to Susanna’s anti-Irish bias: “She describes the Irish emigrants in terms which a reflective writer would scarcely apply to a pack of hounds—as ‘filthy beings sullying the purity of the air and water (of Grosse Ile)’… ‘vicious, uneducated barbarians, far behind the wild man (Indian savage) in delicacy of feeling and natural courtesy.’” The reviewer pointed out that it was thanks to Susanna’s Irish servants, particularly John Monaghan and Jenny, that the Moodies survived the bush. However, the reviewer added that Roughing It in the Bush was “one of the most valuable books hitherto published on that ever-novel, and always interesting subject, the customs and manners of large classes of people.”
For Susanna, ten good reviews could not heal the hurt of one snarky comment. She was particularly upset because the London Observer’s review was reprinted in the Montreal Pilot in March 1852. Moreover, once copies of Roughing It in the Bush started to arrive in Canada, Susanna found she had touched sensitive nerves in a young and self-conscious literary community, in which writers had first-hand knowledge of the bush. Charles Lindsey, editor of the Examiner and son-in-law of William Lyon Mackenzie, went after her for putting on airs. He called her “An ape of the aristocracy. Too poor to lie on a sofa and too proud to work for her bread.” Such a glib quip was hardly fair, and Susanna pretended to laugh it off. “I can bear the castigation,” she assured friends. Another reviewer in the United Empire accused her of penning “an unfaithful portrait of a settler’s life”; she had either “greatly overrated her sufferings in the bush, or …very bad management must have occasioned them.” This reviewer pointed out that, by colonial standards, the Moodies were well off: they had arrived in Canada with enough money to buy a cleared farm; they had received a handsome legacy; and they had benefited from both John’s commission and then his salary as a captain in the militia. All these reviews, and their disparaging comments, left a nasty taste in Susanna’s mouth. She convinced herself that Canadians hated her. “Will they ever forgive me for writing Roughing It?” she wrote Bentley. “They know that it was the truth, but have I not been a mark for every vulgar editor of a village journal, through the length and breadth of the land to hurl a stone at, and point out as the enemy of Canada?”
Good reviews in three Toronto newspapers—the Globe, the British Colonist, and the Anglo-American Magazine—did not calm her down or alter her view that Canadians were “vindictive, treacherous and dishonest. They always impute to your words and actions the worst motives, and no abuse is too coarse to express in their public journals.” To outsiders, Susanna seemed cool and self-possessed, but in private she could be thin-skinned and unsure of herself. The bad reviews and Agnes’s anger triggered all the insecurities of her childhood, when she had felt unloved by her father and sisters. As usual, she now turned to John for support, and as usual, John was there for her. Whatever the trials of living in Canada, Susanna’s happy marriage was a source of strength. She acknowledged this in a touching letter to her publisher: “As a wife and mother, I have been so blessed, that one day spent in the company of my dear white-haired husband, is worth all the joys and sorrows of those sad years of home.”
Blessed as a wife she might be. But she was not so blessed as a mother. Just when Susanna was feeling most vulnerable, she was finding that she could not look to her own children for much support.
The first of the Moodie offspring to cause problems was Agnes, the delicate and willful second daughter. Agnes and Susanna had had a difficult relationship since Agnes was six, when she was farmed out to live with Mary Hague in Peterborough during Susanna’s final months in the bush. When the Moodies were at last ready to move to Belleville, Mary had not wanted to give the little girl back. She and Aggie adored each other, and Aggie had screamed resentfully when she was reunited with her own family. Susanna described Agnes as “lively and volatile” (which makes her sound suspiciously like Susanna herself) and felt that the Hagues, however well-meaning, had spoiled Agnes. She criticized her daughter for being selfish and obsessed with her own good looks.
The constant fault-finding drove Agnes into the arms of her beau, a charming Toronto lawyer named Charles Fitzgibbon, whom she insisted on marrying in 1850 when she was only seventeen. Charlie and Agnes made a handsome pair: she was the daughter of a famous author and he was the son of Colonel James Fitzgibbon, a hero of both the War of 1812 and the Rebellion of 1837. Susanna kept telling her daughter that her precious Charlie was a gambler who would throw all his money away, but Aggie ignored her and was pregnant soon after the wedding. Susanna foresaw trouble.
Susanna got on better with her eldest daughter. Katie was a sensible, although rather humourless girl who was her father’s favourite and who had done more than her share of housework and childcare for her mother. But both the older boys, Dunbar and Donald, were starting to exasperate their parents with their lackadaisical attitudes. Neither showed any great ambition to make his own way in the world and help Susanna and John. Only Robert, the youngest child, who had never known the hardships of the bush, could still bring a sparkle to Susanna’s eyes.
At the same time, the Moodies were once again finding the wolf at the door. John’s income as sheriff was falling, largely because of the hostility of Belleville’s Tory lawyers. And Susanna’s main source of income in Canada had disappeared with the collapse of John Lovell’s Literary Garland in 1851.
Perhaps it was all these worries, alongside the stress of her row with Agnes, that caused Susanna’s descent into serious illness for much of 1852. Two physicians were called in, which meant heavy medical bills. They recommended a recuperative boat trip to Toronto (where she could visit Agnes) and to Niagara Falls. She underwent the voyage
, but it didn’t do her health much good—by November, she was “a sort of living skeleton,” she told Bentley, “the very ghost of my former self.” Nevertheless, it provided her with some new literary material with which she could fulfil her publisher’s request for a sequel to Roughing It in the Bush.
Eager to capitalize on Susanna’s success, Bentley had asked her for “an account of the present state of society in the colony.” Eager to earn some money fast, Susanna supplied something rather different: a manuscript in which she cobbled together some reflections on Canada at mid-century, three pieces she had intended for Roughing It and a couple of character sketches she had already written. She decided to structure the book around her voyage to Niagara Falls, inserting the other pieces plus some new material along the way. The device didn’t really work, the style (imperious rather than confessional) was less attractive than Roughing It, and the resulting book, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush, never came together. Nevertheless, it tells us a lot about both Susanna and Canada.
Susanna started off by defending herself from the criticisms of her first book. She went out of her way to talk about Canada’s potential, particularly for honest labourers. “Canada has become almost as dear to me as my native land,” she insisted, and the country “appears to us a giant for her years, and well worthy the most serious contemplation.” She explained to readers that her references to Irish immigrants were “drawn with an affectionate, not a malignant hand,” and that her comments on life in the bush were intended to warn “well-educated persons not to settle in localities for which they were unfitted by their previous habits and education.” She took a swipe at her sister Agnes, by quoting “An English lady” who told her to stop writing about Canada because “Who, in England, thinks anything of Canada?” Such an attitude, sniffed Susanna, “savoured not a little of arrogance, and still more of ignorance, in the fair writer who, being a woman of talent, should have known better.”
Susanna was more careful in Life in the Clearings than she had been in Roughing It: she scarcely mentioned her own family, and she certainly didn’t caricature her neighbours. Fame had put Susanna on the defensive, and made her a self-conscious commentator. She often ducked serious debate (“It requires the strong-thinking heart of man to anticipate events, and trace certain results from particular causes”), although she could not resist riding some of her favourite hobbyhorses, such as the absurdity of expensive mourning clothes and the importance of universal education.
The book gives us a glimpse of a middle-aged woman who had become a personality within the society that she was writing about, and while she was travelling, she was invited to tour some of the colony’s most interesting sights and meet some of its most notable citizens. Had Agnes been presented with such an opportunity, she would immediately have suggested an introduction to the Earl of Elgin, then Governor General of British North America. If the same opportunity had been offered to Catharine, she would have been thrilled to meet a learned Victorian botanist at a university who might help her identify the flora of the Rice Lake Plains. But Susanna’s choice was characteristically ornery. She chose to visit Toronto’s Provincial Lunatic Asylum, whose inmates during this period were put on show like animals in a zoo. And she chose to write about an individual with no aristocratic or intellectual significance, who was nevertheless of enthralling interest to a student of human nature. She devoted a whole chapter of Life in the Clearings to one of the most notorious women in nineteenth-century Canada, Grace Marks.
Grace was a young Irishwoman who had been convicted, along with a male accomplice, of murdering her employer, a gentleman called Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Susanna first encountered Grace Marks in 1849 at Kingston Penitentiary—a “house of woe and crime,” as she called it. She described with gruesome delight the brutality of the crime in which Grace had been involved. Kinnear (or Captain Kinnaird as Susanna erroneously called him) had been shot at point-blank range, and Nancy Montgomery (“Hannah” in Susanna’s account) was felled with an axe. Grace’s accomplice had wielded the weapons of murder, but Grace was convicted of egging him on. At Kingston, Susanna was struck by the dramatic contrast between the savage murder and Grace’s good looks: “Her complexion is fair, and must, before the touch of hopeless sorrow paled it, have been very brilliant. Her eyes are a bright blue, her hair auburn, and her face would be rather handsome were it not for the long curved chin, which gives, as it always does to most persons who have this facial defect, a cunning, cruel expression.” When the penitentiary’s matron introduced Susanna to Grace Marks, the young convict must have found the intense stare of the self-assured, middle-aged author quite unnerving. For her part, Susanna watched the young woman quail before her penetrating gaze: “Grace Marks glances at you with a sidelong stealthy look; her eye never meets yours, and after a furtive regard, it invariably bends its gaze upon the ground.”
Three years later, on her way home from Niagara Falls, Susanna was shown around Toronto’s Lunatic Asylum and she made a special point of seeking out Grace, who had recently arrived there because “the fearful hauntings of her brain had terminated in madness.” Grace now presented the author with an even more enthralling image. She was “no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment.” Susanna was mesmerized by this vision of monstrous beauty. As a writer, she longed to give narrative shape to what had happened to the young Irishwoman. She invented a few gruesome details to make the crime fit the Victorian taste for melodrama: Kinnear’s body, according to her account, was cut into quarters by the guilty duo. And she decided that Grace’s madness had a redemptive purpose: it was a punishment inflicted by God, who would not let the “unhappy girl” forget the horrible bloodshot eyes of her victim. “When will the long horror of her punishment and remorse be over?” she asked with portentous gravity. “When will she sit at the feet of Jesus, clothed with the unsullied garments of his righteousness, the stain of blood washed from her hand, and her soul redeemed, and pardoned?”
Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings versus the Bush are the two books for which Susanna Moodie is best remembered. However, she published a further four books, all novels, in the early 1850s. In 1853, the same year as Life in the Clearings appeared, Bentley brought out Mark Hurdlestone. The following year, Flora Lyndsay, or Passages in an Eventful Life and Matrimonial Speculations appeared. In 1856, came The Moncktons. Versions of these works had first appeared in the Literary Garland, and most of them were old-fashioned Gothic romances. Susanna’s impressive output in these years was prompted by simple need. Her agreement with Richard Bentley was for an initial payment for each of her books, plus a half-share of the profits. To her chagrin, none of the later books did as well as Roughing It, and her income quickly dropped off. “I begin to feel a mortifying certainty that my style does not suit the generality of readers,” she confessed to Bentley. “It belongs like me to the past.”
She was right: her London reviews were increasingly crabby. One went so far as to say that the story and characters in The Moncktons “appear to have been brought out of a dusty toy-box.” The comment unnerved Susanna, who had been struggling to stay abreast of literary fashions. Sometimes she and John borrowed from their wealthier friends the latest works by British authors such as Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson and Macaulay, or American authors such as Longfellow and Emerson; sometimes Bentley sent them some titles. And there were always Mr. Duff and Mr. Harrison, the two booksellers on Belleville’s Front Street, who had regular shipments from London and New York. But British fiction in the mid-nineteenth century reflected a society entirely foreign to someone who had left Britain before Victoria ascended the throne. By mid-century, British writers were tracking a society in flux, with tension between town and country and between rich and poor. The fiction teemed with types and plots unknown to Regency era writers: nouveau riche factory owners, embattled aristocrats, scheming politicians, ambitious women and the
pathetic victims of industrialization. The great Victorian novels were written with an intellectual slant very different from that of Susanna’s flowery tales, featuring stock heroes and fainting ladies. Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House and Thackeray’s Pendennis and Vanity Fair (all of which Susanna read hot off the press) included not only the social comedy familiar from Jane Austen’s novels but also a steady flow of ironic and moral comment. Susanna was happy enough to make such comments in her non-fiction work (a little too happy, if truth be told: parts of Life in the Clearings read like a church tract), but she had neither the skill nor the confidence to incorporate her own ideas into the conventional plots of her fictional works.
By the time that The Moncktons appeared, Susanna felt less confidence in herself as a writer than she had felt since she’d arrived in Canada. She didn’t belong anywhere. English critics regarded her work as passé; Canadians, she felt, had rejected her. She was an outsider in both her native and her adopted lands, and she was angered by what she perceived as non-stop criticism. Only John could always cheer her up and make her feel both talented and lovable. When they were parted, Susanna was unsettled and miserable. John took a trip into the United States in 1856, and Susanna wrote to Catharine: “Time lengthens into ages while he is away. Will age never diminish my love for this man … he is as dear to me after five and twenty years of intercourse as he was when we first met. The kind darling sent me a beautiful gold locket and chain containing a capital likeness of himself. You would laugh to see me regarding that white bearded face with the devotion of old times. The old romance of my nature is not quite dead. The poetry of life still lingers about my heart.”
Despite sales in the United States, Susanna’s writing income continued to shrink. Susanna could expect no help from home. “I never hear from Reydon now,” she told her publisher. “They have ignored me and my books.” The rift with Agnes was still not mended, and the only news that Susanna got was via Catharine.
Sisters in the Wilderness Page 24
