Literary Garland Were Poems, Many of Them Reprints

VOYAGES This page intentionally left blank VOYAGES Onopf Happatives ol ousanna IVloodie CANADIAN SHORT STORY LIBRARY, No. 15 Edited by John Thurston University of Ottawa Press Ottawa Press Canadian Short Story Library, Series 2 John Moss, General Editor © University of Ottawa Press, 1991 Printed and bound in Canada ISBN 0-7766-03 26-4 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Moodie, Susanna, 1803-1885. Voyages (The Canadian short story library; 15) ISBN 0-7766-0326-4 I. Thurston, John Harry, 1955- . II. Tide. Ill. Series. PS8426.O63V69 1991 C813'.3 C91-090234-8 PR9199.2.M65V69 1991 UNIVERSITY D'OTTAWA UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA Series design concept: Miriam Bloom Book design: Marie Tappin CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction vii A Dream 1 The Pope's Promise 4 Old Hannah; or, The Charm 16 My Aunt Dorothy's Legacy 25 The Vanquished Lion 31 The Doctor Distressed 43 The Sailor's Return 49 The Broken Mirror 64 The Well in the Wilderness 87 Rachel Wilde, or, Trifles from the Burthen of a Life 98 The Quiet Horse 151 Trifles from the Burthen of a Life 160 My Cousin Tom 241 Washing the Black-A-Moor White 253 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Leslie Monkman for encouragement, insight- ful criticism and patience; to Jack Healey for giving much, with nothing but this in return; to John Moss for support and backing; to Leslea Keevil for being my worst, best, critic. Janet Shorten and Jenny Wilson at the University of Ottawa Press have earned my gratitude for their care and good judgment. My parents and my son have given me reasons to do what I do, even when they have had little to do with it. Finally, my thanks to Debra Weinber who, in more ways than I can admit, makes my work possible. INTRODUCTION Susanna Moodie (nee Strickland) is well known for Roughing It in the Bush and, to a lesser extent, Life in the Clearings, accounts of her New World experience. However, little attention has been paid to the remainder of her extensive output. She began publishing in the 1820s alongside the popular women writers who broke the ground in which the more durable works of the Brontes and Elizabeth Gaskell grew. Similarly, the seeds of Roughing It may be found in Susanna Strickland's writing for the new fashionable magazines in England. As with the earlier popular writers, much of her work for both British and colonial magazines is con- ventional, romantic and predictable, while her best-known book is exploratory, realistic and open-ended. She earned her popularity through her skill in satisfying the expectations of her audience. But some of her short prose shares those features of Roughing It that are now more valued. Her more interesting sketches and stories vacillate between demon- strating comforting cliches and grappling with difficult lived particulars. Tentative acts of discovery, they produce the dis- junction between literary and social conventions and the individual experience with which those conventions fail to deal. Gaps and contradictions are never more apparent than when she uses her life for material. And much of her short fiction is autobiographical, generically less like the fashionable romances it appeared alongside than like Roughing It. While her short narratives illuminate her canonical text, they also stand as examples of the craft of fiction in the first half of the nineteenth century. Susanna Strickland was bom on 6 December 1803 in the county of Suffolk, England.1 Her father had attempted to elevate himself and his family to gentry status but he suf- fered a financial loss early in 1818 and died that spring. His wife and their eight children were left in reduced circumstances. In the late 1820s Susanna and four of her sisters began to supplement the family income with earnings from their publications. At the end of the decade she experienced an emotional and religious crisis which she eventually resolved in the spring of 1830 by leaving the Church of INTRODUCTION -vii England and converting to a Dissenting sect. That summer she met Lieutenant John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a half-pay officer from the British army whose Scots family had lost its land. Having obtained Susanna's consent to emi- grate — one of the few ways for fallen gentry to improve their circumstances — Moodie married her in April 1831. (I have chosen the convention of referring to her as Susanna Strickland until her marriage, and as Mrs. Moodie there- after.) On 1 July 1832 they set sail from Edinburgh for Upper Canada. That fell the Moodies and their eight-month-old daughter settled on the Lake Ontario front, near Port Hope. After eighteen months, dissatisfied with the neighbourhood, they took up land north of Peterborough among a more congenial society of middle-class immigrants, including Mrs. Moodie's brother, Samuel, and her sister, Catharine Parr Traill. Backwoods farming was not to their liking either, however, and within four years they were seeking a way out. Following the Upper Canadian Rebellion of 1837, Moodie served as a captain in the militia at Toronto. On the basis of this and subsequent service, and on her own contribution of loyal poems to the turmoil, Mrs. Moodie petitioned the Lieutenant-Governor for a permanent position for her husband. In the fell of 1839 J.W.D. Moodie was appointed Sheriff of Hastings County and was stationed in Belleville. In January 1840 Mrs. Moodie, now with five children, rejoined her husband, from whom she had been separated for most of the previous two years. This move did not, however, usher in the season of comfort and content for which she longed. Moodie's tenure as sheriff was plagued by the unceasing machinations of a local elite, until his resignation in January 1863. The Moodies never achieved financial sta- bility or social rapprochement, and when J.W.D. Moodie died on 22 October 1869 his wife was left to the care of her children and sister. Mrs. Moodie relied mainly on two daughters who had married well, since her three surviving sons lacked economic security themselves. She died at a daughter's home in Toronto on 8 April 1885. viii INTRODUCTION The Writing of a Life The varying economic circumstances of Mrs. Moodie's life largely determined her writing. A more detailed consideration of significant events in her life will serve to show how consistently they are involved in her narratives, especially those in this collection. The Stricklands came from the yeomanry of the British north counties. Susanna's grandfather, bereft of hereditary lands by the return of a relative with prior claims, moved to London. Born in 1758, her father, Thomas Strickland, became a dock manager for a London shipowner, but was advised to retire to the eastern counties for his health. Susanna, the last of six daughters born to Strickland's second wife, Elizabeth (nee Homer, 1772-1864), and their first Suffolk child, was fol- lowed by two brothers. She spent her first five years in a rented house, at which point her father bought Reydon Hall, outside Southwold on the Suffolk coast. The Hall is described in "Rachel Wilde" and "Trifles from the Burthen of a Life," and it, the town and the county appear throughout her writing with their initials and a dash. Her stories and sketches, apart from her historical sketches and a very few others, are set in this locale. With his London capital Thomas Strickland estab- lished business connections in Norwich, Norfolk, with a near relation of his wife. Initially his investments thrived and Reydon Hall, a country estate with tenant farms, marked his ascent into the gentry. But Norwich was especially affected by the post-Napoleonic Wars depression and Strickland was forced to spend more time there than anticipated to oversee his investments. Early in 1818 the business with which he was involved failed and on 18 May he died, leaving his family the Hall, worthless stock and no liquid assets. Several sources attest to the difficult financial circumstances in which he left his wife and children. These events, determin- ing Susanna's future, haunt her writing. She depicts a fall from economic grace in more than a dozen stories. Sometimes she combines loss of caste with a father's death; more importantly, this loss is the cause of emigration in "The Vanquished Lion," "The Broken Mirror," 'The INTRODUCTION ix Sailor's Return," "The Well in the Wilderness" and "Trifles from the Burthen of a Life." Susanna Moodie's account of the lives of the Wilde children in "Rachel Wilde" accords with accounts of the early lives of the Stricklands. All the daughters except Jane are rep- resented: Susanna as the eponymous heroine, Catharine as Dorothea, Sarah as Selina, Agnes as Ann and Elizabeth as Lilla; the sons Samuel and Thomas appear without being named. The Stricklands had a good library and before his death their father, assisted by Elizabeth, took an active role in educating his younger daughters. He so controlled their reading, however, that when Mrs. Moodie has Rachel familiar at seven with Shakespeare and Homer (in Pope's translation), she names two of the few poets he allowed his girls to read. They were encouraged to study history, particularly English history of the Civil War and Restoration. The account of the Wildes' reading reveals how the Strickland girls compensated for their father's ban on merely ornamental or entertaining literature. History became romance. Susanna was later enthralled with "the romance of history."2 Rachel Wilde's story spans the years 1808-1815, from her sixth to her twelfth year, Mr.

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