Susanna Moodie. Anne Cimon

To Eileen,and always,my family

      The Visionary Woman who is intuitive and sees into the future

       reveals messages – sometimes dark prophecies, sometimes

       visions of light – and is suspect to the rational mind.

       – Linda Schierse Leonard, Meeting the Madwoman

       Contents

Prologue: A Strange Land

1 Country Girl

2 Bluestocking

3 Enthusiasm and Love

4 The Crossing

       5 Rough Canadians

       6 Letter to the Governor

       7 Colonial Woes

       8 Fame and Family Rejection

       9 Niagara Falls

       10 Under a Spell

       11 Legacy

       Epilogue: The Dark Angel

       Afterword

       Chronology of Susanna Moodie (1803-1885)

       Sources Consulted

       Index

      Quebec City, lit by an autumnal glow, appeared as a shrine to

      Susanna from the deck of the ship she had been on

      for nine weeks.

Prologue A Strange Land

      I felt that I was a stranger in a strange land; my heart yearned intensely for my absent home. Home! the word had ceased to belong to my present – it was doomed to live for ever in the past; for what emigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home? – Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush.

      Susanna, unable to stay in the dank interior of the cabin, had come back on deck for some cool air and a last look at the panorama of Quebec City. She stood tall and straight at the railing of the brig Anne and watched as the moon rose and cast mysterious gleams upon the landscape. Towering pine trees seemed to frown down upon the St. Lawrence River, which flowed rapidly between rugged banks.

      How could she possibly find words to describe this sublime landscape? And yet she felt a familiar pressure, the desire to capture it on paper for others to experience. At twenty-eight, Susanna had left London a well-known literary figure, and she had copies of her first volume of poetry in her luggage. She had married John Dunbar Moodie a little more than a year ago, on April 4, 1831. Now they had a baby, and like hundreds of emigrants from Scotland, Ireland, and Britain who filled the ships anchored in Quebec harbour, they were seeking a better life in the colony of Upper Canada.

      The Anne, jammed between other vessels in the crowded harbour, had suffered serious damage during the night when a larger ship accidentally plowed into its deck. Many of the passengers were awakened by the loud noise and rushed up to see what had happened, Susanna among them.

      “What’s all the confusion?” Susanna inquired of Captain Rodgers. Surrounded by a group of women who had become hysterical with fear, he couldn’t speak.

      “Let the poor man alone,” Susanna exclaimed, “We must go below deck. We’ll be safer there.”

      The force in her voice convinced the dozen or so women to follow her. Susanna hadn’t allowed her own fears to show.

      “Let’s pray,” she suggested.

      One young woman cried that she didn’t know how to pray.

      “Just repeat the words after me.”

      And Susanna had begun to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

      Now, a towline had been attached to a huge steamer, which began to tug the Anne out of Quebec harbour. Enveloped in black smoke and flinging red sparks out of its funnel, the steamer resembled some firebreathing demon. Susanna stood at the railing of the Anne and struggled with her anxious thoughts. Will we even reach our next destination, the port of Montreal? she wondered.

      In the darkness she felt like a pilgrim, her head filled with visions, her fate in the hands of Providence, as the ship carried her up the river into a strange new land.

      Thomas Strickland purchased the Elizabethan manor Reydon Hall

      in Suffolk when Susanna was five. She liked to hide in the attic

       to write stories with her sister, Catharine.

1 Country Girl

      I am the creature of extremes, the child of impulse and the slave of feeling.

      – Susanna Moodie, Letters of a Lifetime

      Susanna Strickland was born on December 6, 1803, in the village of Bungay, Suffolk, England. She was the sixth daughter of Elizabeth Homer and Thomas Strickland. She followed Eliza, Agnes, Sarah, Jane, and Catharine Parr (named after the sixth wife of Henry VIII). Born sickly, Susanna was quickly baptized at St. Mary’s Anglican Church, for her parents feared the worst. Her given name had a tragic connotation because the name recalled Susanna Butt, Thomas Strickland’s first wife, who had died while giving birth. Her brothers, Samuel and Thomas, followed, to complete the Strickland family.

      For a child with a poetic temperament like Susanna, rural Suffolk was an ideal place to grow up in. Only a few kilometres away in the Lake District, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were leading the Romantic Movement with their Lyrical Ballads. First published in 1798, this volume would later influence Susanna deeply.

      At three years old, Susanna played with her sister’s and brothers on the grounds of Stowe House, a Georgian manor Thomas Strickland rented in the Waveney Valley. The setting was Edenic: Susanna often ran to the stream and cupped her hands to drink the pure water, or pulled wild strawberries from the bushes to eat her fill of the sweet fruit.

      She soon accompanied her father and her older sister Catharine to the Waveney River, which looped around the village of Bungay. Fly fishing was her father’s favourite sport: Susanna watched her father from the green bank as he waded into the water with his fly fishing pole. If only I were as pretty and sweet as Catharine, Susanna thought, as her father talked to her sister. If only I had the same long blond hair, and not these red curls that no comb can tame. Catharine was the favourite; everyone in the family knew that.

      “Father,” Susanna cried out: “I’ve seen a crocodile.”

      “Now,