Charlotte Gray - Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill

Praise for Sisters in the Wilderness

National Bestseller

Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award 2000 for the Non-Fiction Book of the Year

Winner of the 1999 Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History

Shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award

A Globe 100 Book of 1999

Everyone knows the stories of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, but not until this double biography has so much been revealed about the sisters who founded a literary tradition in Canada.

Ottawa Citizen

Richly detailed and wonderfully written Gray [exhibits] an uncommon ability to tell a compelling story evocative superb

The London Free Press

Sisters in the Wilderness is a masterly biography. [A] particularly moving portrait of pioneer life: the raw landscape, the endless journeys, the hazards of travel, the terrors of lonely settlements.

Calgary Herald/Ottawa Citizen

A captivating double biography.

Financial Times

Simply one of the most delightful books youll ever read. Whats more, you dont have to be a Canadian to enjoy it.

The Canada Post

A fine and astringent book what distinguishes this book isa most enviable quality in any biographya superb trustworthiness. That trust is born out of intelligence and sympathy alike.

Times Literary Supplement

Charlotte Grays exciting new biography, the beautifully-illustrated Sisters in the Wilderness, brings these women to life beyond their books.

The Hamilton Spectator

A major contribution Gray is equally forthcoming with detail about life in the bush and towns of 19th century Canada. I was thoroughly engrossed. Sisters is a keeper that will be useful in many ways for a long time to come.

Toronto Star

Many delights [in] this superb biography.

Quill & Quire, starred review

In Charlotte Grays wonderful new biography, [the sisters] are brought to life as two remarkable women whose close relationship never faltered throughout their long and often challenging lives. Gray draws a compelling and insightful picture of these two very different women and the time in which they lived. With meticulous research and an immensely readable style, Gray chronicles the sisters never-ending struggles and their eventual rise to literary fame

National Post

Gray has produced a fascinating examination of two of this countrys seminal woods-and-prairies writers [an] entertaining and honest picture of two plucky gentlewomens thrashings in the bush.

Edmonton Journal

Hats off to Gray for providing a vehicle that allows us to see these literary revolutionaries in a new, remarkably humanistic light.

The Calgary Straight

Vivid. Gray peels away the hoary stereotypes to reveal the tumultuous lives of two sisters whose prolific writings added immensely to cultural life in the young colony. Sisters in the Wilderness is a meticulously researched historical account graced with the narrative drive, elegant prose and complex characters of an accomplished novel. Grays biography is a winning remedy for the oversights of history.

Macleans

Grays fascinating biography offers us an old-fashioned adventure story for girls, a tribute to the moxie of two remarkable women. Gray memorably contrasts [their] ordeals

Telegraph-Journal (Saint John, NB)

Gray has done a commendable job presenting two most interesting lives.

The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

Charlotte Gray is a superb storyteller and that is what this country desperately needs now that our history has been so shamefully ignored by our educational system.

Pierre Berton

PENGUIN CANADA

SISTERS IN THE WILDERNESS

CHARLOTTE GRAY is one of Canadas best known writers and biographers, and the award-winning author of several bestsellers, including Reluctant Genius: The Passions and Inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King. An adjunct research professor in the department of history at Carleton University, Gray sits on the boards of both the Dominion Institute and the Canadian National History Society. She and her husband live in Ottawa.

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1999

Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000

Published in this edition, 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Charlotte Gray, 1999

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Gray, Charlotte, 1948

Sisters in the wilderness : the lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill / Charlotte Gray.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-14-316836-2

1. Moodie, Susanna, 18031885. 2. Traill, Catherine Parr, 18021899. 3. Frontier and pioneer lifeOntario. 4. Women authors, Canadian (English)19th centuryBiography. 5. Women authors, Canadian (English)OntarioBiography. I. Title.

FC3067.2.G729 2008

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

This book is for my parents, Robert and Elizabeth Gray, with love.

It is also in affectionate memory of my father-in-law

Dr. Reginald Anderson (19101998).

Preface

I wonder, wrote Charles Dickens in the 1830s, if I went to a new colony with my head, hands, legs and health, I should force myself to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream! Upon my word, I believe I should.