THE LOST DIARIES OF SUSANNA MOODIE

Addictively readable historical fiction for fans of The Bride of New France and The Birth House – an epic tale of 1830s immigration and survival that is also a universal woman's story.

When Susanna Moodie begins keeping the fictional journal that comprises this novel, she is an imaginative and carefree twelve-year-old, a member of a large gentrified family in idyllic Regency England. After her father dies, the family is plunged into gentile poverty, and it is in part thanks to the Strickland girls' blossoming writing careers that their widowed mother is able to hold onto the beloved family home.
The mentorship of a family friend and London publisher helps Susanna and her sisters, Eliza, Agnes and Kate, access London literary circles where their poems and stories are warmly met. Eschewing marriage and convention, she spends as much time as she can with relatives in London, basking in her growing notoriety as an author, and engaging in flirtations with her many male admirers. Then she meets the dashing John Dunbar Moodie, returned from the Napoleonic wars and a decade spent farming in South Africa to find a wife. They fall instantly in love, and Susanna's bluestocking obsessions notwithstanding, they marry. But their income is meager and their prospects in England grim, so following the birth of their first daughter, they head to Canada where Moodie is entitled to free land. They endure their first Canadian winter living in a cattle shed, falling victim to unscrupulous land agents and cheating neighbors.
When Susanna's sister Kate and her husband Thomas Traill, a friend of Moodie, also decide to emigrate, the sisters have a joyous reunion, but the New World tests their relationship. More children are born in exceedingly primitive conditions, and the sisters, weakened in body and spirit, are plagued by homesickness, drought, and disease. Meanwhile, Susanna bitterly resents her husband's long absences, and resumes dreaming of a life unencumbered by duty. But despite all the hardships, and almost against her will, Susanna is slowly seduced by the beauty and savagery of her adopted land, awed by its vast forests, beguiled by sparkling waters, alternately humbled and consoled by winter's power, and summer's brief solace. And despite, or perhaps because of, the many trials they have together endured, Susanna's imperfect love for her imperfect husband, the father of her children, endures.
CECILY ROSS is an award-winning writer and editor who has worked at The Globe and Mail. In the 1980s, she lived with her two young daughters across a gravel road from the site of Susanna and John Moodie's first Canadian home. There, in a rented farmhouse, she found a tattered copy of Roughing It in the Bush – Susanna's account of her life in the wilderness – and the seed of this novel was planted.