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Moodie, Mrs. [Susanna] Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush.
New York: De Witt & Davenport, n.d. [but 1854]. Likely the first American edition (ix, 300). Octavo in faded olive publisher’s cloth with impressed decoration, gilt titles and decoration. Corners worn, top and bottom edge of spine lightly abraded; blotched and foxed throughout as usual. In 1853 Bentley, Susanna’s London publisher, issued this somewhat hastily concocted apologetic sequel to Roughing It in the Bush, a book which in its portrayal of pioneer conditions in Canada West had annoyed her neighbours, who felt they had been caricatured by a toffee-nosed snob, and embarrassed her two sisters at home in England, especially the royalty chronicler Agnes, who sought to rescue the family’s reputation from the obloquy of their father’s business failure (and who probably were snobs). The book is loosely ordered as a narative of a journey from Belleville to Niagara Falls, with observations on various personalities and advancements in the fortunes of the colony attached. As Charlotte Gray observes in Sisters in the Wilderness, had Agnes been in Susanna’s shoes, she would have secured the acquaintance of the Governor-General, the Earl of Elgin; but Susanna, ever the blue-stocking reformer, who had in her youth transcribed the memoirs of Mary Prince an escaped slave, chose to visit the insane asylum at Toronto where she sought out Grace Marks, the convicted murderer, and just as much a celebrity as the earl (and thanks to Margaret Atwood a longer remembered one). Quite a satisfactory copy.
Price:
153.00 USD
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