Roughing it in the bush, or, Life in Canada /

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. vii)
• The Text of Roughing It in the Bush (p. 1)
• Choice of Text and Editing Strategy (p. 333)
• Backgrounds
• Illustrations (p. 337)
• Map (p. 342)
• Advertisement for the First Edition (p. 343)
• Preface to Roughing It in the Bush (p. 344)
• Introduction to the 1871 Edition (p. 344)
• Canadian Sketches (p. 351)
• Old Woodruff and His Three Wives (p. 372)
• Jeanie Burns (p. 381)
• Lost Children (p. 389)
• Susanna Moodie's Letters to Her Husband, 1839 (p. 395)
• A Slight Sketch of the Early Life of Mrs. Moodie (p. 399)
• Forest Life in Canada West (p. 401)
• The Backwoods of Canada (p. 404)
• Misrepresentation (p. 405)
• Review from The Provincial: or, Halifax Monthly Magazine (p. 407)
• Review from The Canadian Monthly and National Review (p. 410)
• Criticism
• Afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie (p. 417)
• Susanna Moodie and the English Sketch (p. 419)
• "Secrets of the Prison-House": Mrs. Moodie and the Canadian Imagination (p. 425)
• Rewriting Roughing It (p. 433)
• Breaking the "Cake of Custom": The Atlantic Crossing as a Rubicon for Female Emigrants to Canada? (p. 442)
• "The tongue of woman": The Language of the Self in Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush (p. 473)
• The Waxing and Waning of Susanna Moodie's "Enthusiasm" (p. 490)
• Roughing It in Michigan and Upper Canada: Caroline Kirkland and Susanna Moodie (p. 512)
• Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (p. 522)
• Reconstructing the Palladium of British America: How the Rebellion of 1837 and Charles Fothergill Helped to Establish Susanna Moodie as a Writer in Canada (p. 538)
• The Broken Mirror of Domestic Ideology: Femininity as Textual Practice in Susanna Moodie's Autobiographical Works (p. 559)
• Two Exemplary Early Texts: Moodie's Roughing It and Jameson's Studies and Rambles (p. 571)
• Susanna Strickland Moodie: A Chronology (p. 583)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 585)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

The early part of the winter of 1837, a year never to be forgotten in the annals of Canadian history, was very severe.... The morning of the seventh was so intensely cold that everything liquid froze in the house. The wood that had been drawn for the fire was green, and it ignited too slowly to satisfy the shivering impatience of women and children; I vented mine in audibly grumbling over the wretched fire, at which I in vain endeavoured to thaw frozen bread, and to dress crying children.... After dressing, I found the air so keen that I could not venture out without some risk to my nose, and my husband kindly volunteered to go in my stead. I had hired a young Irish girl the day before. Her friends were only just located in our vicinity, and she had never seen a stove until she came to our house. After Moodie left, I suffered the fire to die away in the Franklin stove in the parlour, and went into the kitchen to prepare bread for the oven. The girl, who was a good-natured creature, had heard me complain bitterly of the cold, and the impossibility of getting the green wood to burn, and she thought that she would see if she could not make a good fire for me and the children, against my work was done. Without saying one word about her intention, she slipped out through a door that opened from the parlour into the garden, ran round to the wood-yard, filled her lap with cedar chips, and, not knowing the nature of the stove, filled it entirely with the light wood. Before I had the least idea of my danger I was aroused from the completion of my task by the crackling and roaring of a large fire, and a suffocating smell of burning soot. I looked up at the kitchen cooking-stove. All was right there. I knew I had left no fire in the parlour stove; but not being able to account for the smoke and smell of burning, I opened the door, and to my dismay found the stove red-hot, from the front plate to the topmost pipe that let out the smoke through the roof. My first impulse was to plunge a blanket, snatched from the servant's bed, which stood in the kitchen, into cold water. This I thrust into the stove, and upon it I threw water, until all was cool below. I then ran up to the loft, and by exhausting all the water in the house, even to that contained in the boilers upon the fire, contrived to cool down the pipes which passed through the loft. I then sent the girl out of doors to look at the roof, which, as a very deep fall of snow had taken place the day before, I hoped would be completely covered, and safe from all danger of fire. She quickly returned, stamping and tearing her hair, and making a variety of uncouth outcries, from which I gathered that the roof was in flames. From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Susanna Moodie, born in Suffolk, England, was the youngest of five daughters, four of whom became writers of fiction and poetry. (Moodie's elder sister, Catharine Parr Traill, a lesser-known British colonial author, wrote The Backwoods of Canada). Before immigrating to Canada, in 1832, Moodie penned numerous poems and stories, all heavily didactic and decidedly second-rate. However, once she had settled in Upper Canada (now Ontario) with her husband, John Dunbar Moodie, the harsh life of the settler provoked a more realistic literary response. Her autobiographical Roughing It in the Bush, published in 1852, is a series of sketches stitched into a larger narrative. It is a book expressing the hopes and defeat, the pride and the anger the early settlers felt toward their new home, the Canadian bush. A sequel, Life in the Clearings versus the Bush, appeared in 1853. Throughout her life Susanna Moodie's literary output continued to be prolific. Yet it is the frank and colorful quality of Roughing It that has placed her in the forefront of early Canadian writers.

(Bowker Author Biography)