Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Susanna Moodie
-
Standard Name: Moodie, Susanna
Birth Name: Susanna Strickland
Married Name: Susanna Moodie
Pseudonym: Z. Z.
SM
is best remembered for her first-person narrative of pioneer life in Canada, Roughing It in the Bush, 1852, considered a foundational work of Canadian literature. She was a prolific author who wrote children's stories, sketches, novels, poetry, and other non-fiction. Her work has proved important for two contemporary Canadian writers, Margaret Atwood
and Carol Shields
.
More than twenty years before this MA
had treated the same historical figure in an unpublished play, Grace Marks, which was broadcast on CBC
television in January 1974 under the title The Servant Girl...
Textual Production
Margaret Atwood
MA
published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a sequence of poems in which she assumes the sometimes strong, sometimes querulous voice of Moodie, an English-born pioneer Canadian writer.
Book Review Index. Gale Research.
1: 225
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
1973
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Atwood
Several of these poems, like Death of a Young Son by Drowning, treat actual incidents of Moodie's life while transforming the plaintive tone adopted in Moodie's own narratives into one of tragedy. Atwood's handling...
Textual Production
Margaret Atwood
An abortive 1970s fundraising project (apparently for the Writers' Union of Canada
) had a number of writers planning to collaborate on a pornographic fiction, which would be written in hilarity and make a large...
The white neck-cloth species, exemplified by Caroline Scott
's The Old Grey Church, is both upper-class and fervently Evangelical in setting: a kind of genteel tract on a large scale, intended as a sort...
Textual Production
Sarah Stickney Ellis
After this and a few other poorly selling ventures in privately printed material, SSE
followed the advice of a friend and contacted the publisher Thomas Pringle
, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society
, who offered...
Textual Production
Eliza Fenwick
Lissa Paul
has established that EF
was writing during her time in North America (working on short stories as well as a novel, apart from her constant letter-writing), but none of these texts appears to...
Cultural formation
Mary Howitt
During the 1850s, following the death of their schoolboy son Claude, MH
and her husband
experimented with spiritualism. MH
received on one occasion a spirit message from Claude.
Dunicliff, Joy. Mary Howitt: Another Lost Victorian Writer. Excalibur Press of London.
148, 210-11
This was the decade when...
Residence
Margaret Laurence
Her final home, to which she moved on 1 May 1974, was in Lakefield, Ontario (which as an early settlement had been the home of both Susanna Moodie
and Catharine Parr Traill
). Here ML
Literary responses
Louisa Anne Meredith
This publication, often considered her most significant, positions her as the first permanent Tasmanian woman resident to author a book on the new colony.
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research.
166: 261
The Athenæum review noted that the minute, yet not...
Friends, Associates
Mary Russell Mitford
She knew most of the literary women of her day, including Felicia Hemans
(who wrote to ask her for an autograph),
L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, editor. The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford as Recorded in Letters from Her Literary Correspondents. Hurst and Blackett.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
2: 213
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
Our Village is often said to have inaugurated its genre of small-scale, local-colour sketch writing, but (apart from Washington Irving
's Geoffrey Crayon's Sketch Book, 1819) it owes an obvious debt to the work...
Textual Features
Alice Munro
Most exotic and improbable of all is The Albanian Virgin (based on an actual experience, about 1900, of a librarian from Clinton, Ontario),
Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro. McClelland and Stewart.
445
which makes use of the ancient tradition, in a tribal society...
Textual Production
Mary Prince
The Anti-Slavery Society
published The History of Mary Prince
, a West Indian Slave. Related by herself, dictated by Prince at her own suggestion to Susanna Strickland (later Moodie)
.
The title was chosen...
Timeline
3 June 1829: Publisher Henry Colburn went into partnership...
By 2 August 1856: Jane Margaret Strickland published a novel,...
Women writers item
By 2 August 1856
Jane Margaret Strickland
published a novel, Adonijah, a tale of the Jewish Dispersion; it was shortly attacked by George Eliot
in Silly Novels by Lady Novelists as one of the deplorable types of fiction...
Texts
Moodie, Susanna. Enthusiasm, and Other Poems. Smith, Elder, 1831.
Moodie, Susanna. Flora Lyndsay; or, Passages in an Eventful Life. R. Bentley, 1854.
Moodie, Susanna. Geoffrey Moncton; or, The Faithless Guardian. DeWitt and Davenport, 1855.
Moodie, Susanna. George Leatrim; or, The Mother’s Test. Hamilton, 1875.
Moodie, Susanna. Life in the Clearings versus the Bush. R. Bentley, 1853.
Moodie, Susanna. Mark Hurdlestone, the Gold Worshipper. R. Bentley, 1853.
Moodie, Susanna. Matrimonial Speculations. R. Bentley, 1854.
Warner, Ashton, and Susanna Moodie. Negro Slavery Described by a Negro. Samuel Maunder, 1831.
Moodie, Susanna et al. Patriotic Songs. J. Green, 1830.
Moodie, Susanna et al. Patriotic Songs, 1830. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/moodie-traill/027013-5007-e.html.
Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. R. Bentley, 1852.
Moodie, Susanna, and Susan Glickman. Roughing It in the Bush. McClelland and Stewart, 1989.
Moodie, Susanna. Spartacus. A. K. Newman, 1822.
Prince, Mary, and Susanna Moodie. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Editor Pringle, Thomas, F. Westley and A.H. Davis; Waugh and Innes, 1831.
Moodie, Susanna, and Elizabeth Strickland. The Little Prisoner; or, Passion and Patience; and, Amendment; or, Charles Grant and his Sister. Dean and Munday, 1828.
Moodie, Susanna. The World Before Them. R. Bentley, 1867.