Thursday, October 14, 2010

Susanna Moodie

Canadian literary character, real life woman, pioneer, writer and guiding voice to those women back home on Canadian frontier life. Her husband was a drifting dreamer with little ambition and even less physical ability to survive in the wilderness.  Suffered starvation and sickness alone with her children, learned to hunt for herself, learned to appreciate what her native neighbors taught her and brought her, and burnt letter after desperate angry letter to her husband when she had no one to talk to. To her sisters, to the women of England, and to her publisher she sent words of jolly stiff-upper-lip practicality, friendly tips on how to preserve wild strawberries, and documented the botanical wonders of the "new" world.