Roughing It in the Buth

Mrs. Susanna Moodie's work includes many journals, books, sketches and poetry, which were mostly composed in the backwoods of Belleville, Ontario, Canada. From being relocated to a remote area and having to be self sufficient for the majority of her life her work results in having strong feminist bias and nature themes. Susanna Moodie is one of Canada's leading female artists who have written in great detail about early Canadian life She and her family immigrated to Upper Canada in the mid-1800s (1832). Her most famous works were her poetry and her novel Roughing it in the Bush, although she wrote many works such as life in the clearing versus the bush, matrimonial speculation, and many more books, poems and sketches during her life time.

Susanna Moodie, Strickland was born and raised in England, where she was tutored by her father in geography, mathematics and natural science. Moodie had an education most young women of her time did not, and went on to support their family with her sisters by selling pictures, short stories and poems. She married Lieutenant John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a writer; militia officer; sheriff and co-editor of Victoria Magazine. They shortly there after set sail for

Canada on July 1st, not by choice of Susanna, as she desperately wanted to stay in England. For financial reasons they immigrated to Upper Canada and by August of 1832 John and Susanna settled in Peterborough not far from Moodie's sister and brother. They moved to Belleville in the early 1840s. While raising her seven children Susanna kept writing and sketching for many literary magazines and many English papers to bring understanding of life in early Canada to Europe. She began to write for the Literary Press in 1838, and was a major contributor to that magazine for the next twelve years. She also wrote numerous sketches on Canada that would become the basis for the book Roughing it in the Bush. These sketches were published in Victoria Magazine, which both John and Susanna edited from 1847 to 1848 while living in Belleville.

Many scholars believe Susanna Moodie got her sense of poetic style from three motivations at a young age: her father's disciplines, with the study of geography, and natural science; the great amount of responsibility she and sisters had making ends meet after her father's death; and a man by the name of Thomas Pringle, secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society, who gave Moodie a great interest in humanitarian issues. In 1831 she transcribed slavery narratives, which were both published. Those three factors form the roots of Susanna Moodies style, which is evident in the majority of her work.

Throughout Susanna Moodie's Indian Summer; there is beautiful imagery of the setting sun seen on Indian summer days, an image all Canadians can relate too. Anywhere in Canada the sun will set like this on one of the last days of autumn when winter is right around the corner Susanna uses nature in its purest form, without the influence of human life to set the scene of this poem. Moodie