Roughing It in the Bush Susanna Moodie 9781514378977 Books
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Canada, the blest—the free! With prophetic glance, I see Visions of thy future glory, Giving to the world's great story A page, with mighty meaning fraught, That asks a wider range of thought. Borne onward on the wings of Time, I trace thy future course sublime; And feel my anxious lot grow bright, While musing on the glorious sight;— My heart rejoicing bounds with glee To hail thy noble destiny!
Roughing It in the Bush Susanna Moodie 9781514378977 Books
I read this book partly out of a sense of duty — after all, it is one of the original pieces of Canadian journalism — but to some degree it surprised me. I expected the treacly sentiment, the piety, the swooning over the landscape, but I found Moodie's sharp sense of humour bracing. She had a reporter's eye for the details that set individuals apart, and she was honest enough to question her own values. It is really touching to think of what these early settlers endured: vast distances, lack of any social or medical support for themselves or their children, no experience of the extremes of the climate, the animals, the uncertain crops. It's easy to smile at Moodie's inability to wash clothes, her fear of cows, her confusion about class, her naivete in the face of her tough, larcenous neighbours, but to give her credit, she lays it all out there. I note that her husband wrote several chapters but she gets all the attention. I know the communities they lived in, and will regard them with new eyes now.Product details
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Roughing It in the Bush Susanna Moodie 9781514378977 Books Reviews
Excellant writing, as real window to the pinoneering Spirit of canada
Would have given parts of it 4 stars, but other parts were slow and the interruptions to the story by poetry sometimes made it hard to follow.
VERY well written, and an interesting and accurate insight to every-day life in early Canada, written from the perspective of a wife and mother, instead of from the usual perspective of a male adventurer or military officer!
This book is a report of a time and place of human settlement endeavor in North America - Canadian pioneering history of the 1830s - that would as far as I know be in greater darkness were it not for Moodie (and her husband, and sister K. P. Traill too). I consider this book priceless. There were not many fully literate English people, not to mention women people, in the undeveloped woods of Canada in 1832! What an amazing treasure. Good to read, too, I think.
Susanna Moodie captures what life was like for pioneers in Canada. She writes in a natural, unaffected way, and documents her journey from England to Canada, where she and her husband started a farm and raised a family. She brings to life the hardships, the worries, and the day to day routines of these settlers, in now familiar places.
Where was this book in the bra-burner days of the 1960's and 1970's The Feminine Mystique meets Moodie, Judy Chicago inviting Susanna to The Dinner Party? Barely begin reading and you will want to give a swift kick in the pants (and wish that she had done it) to her ever-absent husband who dragged her back from honest mud of the pioneer life to the Cheney's and Halliburton's of mid-nineteenth century western civilization.
We are frustrated that she doesn't speak up to those who take and trample over her. Speak up, woman! Don't let them get away with it!
Her daughter and granddaughter were historic photographers who set milestones. Where were they mentioned in my history books or Girl Scout handbooks? Roughing it in the Bush is about women's place and power, make no mistake about it, whether you like it or not.
I'm finding that with the eyes of the world on Canada, Alaska, and the Arctic suffering from rapid global climate change, books on this part of the world are becoming increasingly easier to find for those who seek the obscure, out-of-print titles being resurrected by reader inquiry and demand.
This story is from the 1830's onwards and its setting is the (then) British colony of Canada.
Adopting various formats including that of a novel, a romance, a diary and a history, embroidered with poems, the book relates Moodie's experiences as an immigrant settled with her husband to a primitive and penniless pioneering life near present-day Peterborough, Ontario, in forests that were, at the time, remote and near-impenetrable. Moodie opens with a grim warning that a settler's life is extremely harsh; and a condemnation of the glib promoters urging Englishmen to emigrate and thereby accede to wealth and a life of ease, which in fact becomes nothing but a tragic pipe dream for the vast majority.
The author is manifestly an intelligent, compassionate, sensitive and observant person with a marked talent for writing and poetry. Her education had most certainly not been of a common sort. Her character inspired Margaret Atwood's fine book of poems in our era, "The Journals of Susanna Moodie".
It is no surprise, then, that Moodie's book was a best-seller in its day and is, even now, of enduring interest, especially to a Canadian. I liked most particularly her sympathetic vignettes of Canada's native peoples that she had encountered. "Nature's gentlemen", she called them, in contrast to the noisy bedraggled multitudes flooding the shores from Europe. The mind-numbing hardships and poverty endured by Canada's early pioneers, so vividly described by the author, are a phase of history one tends to gloss over in modern times. It needed a particular mindset, motivation, and formidable physical attributes to become a thriving hewer of wood, drawer of water and ultimately a farmer in the primeval wilderness. A great many of the immigrants just did not have that moxie, nor the benign helping hand of fortune (although there were others too, of course, who did have it in spades).
Her remark in the early part of the book, which I copied (from an audio version) and reproduce here, made me understand so much better my own parents' feelings as immigrants to this same land, whom I had, as a callow youth, classified cavalierly as perpetual exiles "My heart yearned intensely for my absent home. Home! The word had ceased to belong to my present. It was doomed to live forever in the past. For what immigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home? To the land that he has left that name belongs forever, and in no instance does he bestow it upon another. 'I have got a letter from home ...'; 'I have seen a friend from home...'; 'I dreamt last night that I was at home...'; are expressions of everyday occurrence to prove that the heart acknowledges no other home than the land of its birth". How aptly, how touchingly put!
Moodie provides insights helpful to the understanding of other authors' works from that same era; for instance, those of Rudyard Kipling. We infer that British officers who retired early due to battlefield injuries received only half-pension, which made it virtually impossible for them to live decently back in England and often served as a powerful spur towards emigration. Having been schooled by the Empire to command and to be obeyed, they had little aptitude for _living _with_ those they had been raised to rule. Dr. Watson shared his Baker Street digs with the legendary Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous series for precisely that reason. On his invalid's pension, Capt (Ret.) Watson would have had a very tough time indeed of survival in London on his own, if he wished to continue rubbing elbows with those of his own class. Watson was a fictional personage, to be sure; but his case was typical.
Such folks were easy marks for promoters urging them to "Go West". That is why the Moodie family emigrated to the colony of Canada, which destination, at that time, was the infatuation of the day. Military retirees on tight budgets such as he were in demand and they went in droves, even though unfit for the rough labouring life of a pioneer, credulously buying into yarns about castles in the sky. This led, far more often than not, to their ultimate sorrow.
Regrettably, the Table of Contents, while well and truly provided, is not linked to the corresponding pages. This obviates the possibility of being able to browse through the book. Accordingly, I am obliged to give my review of this e-book edition only 4 stars, instead of the 5 (and plus!) that it merits. Nevertheless I still highly recommend this work.
I read this book partly out of a sense of duty — after all, it is one of the original pieces of Canadian journalism — but to some degree it surprised me. I expected the treacly sentiment, the piety, the swooning over the landscape, but I found Moodie's sharp sense of humour bracing. She had a reporter's eye for the details that set individuals apart, and she was honest enough to question her own values. It is really touching to think of what these early settlers endured vast distances, lack of any social or medical support for themselves or their children, no experience of the extremes of the climate, the animals, the uncertain crops. It's easy to smile at Moodie's inability to wash clothes, her fear of cows, her confusion about class, her naivete in the face of her tough, larcenous neighbours, but to give her credit, she lays it all out there. I note that her husband wrote several chapters but she gets all the attention. I know the communities they lived in, and will regard them with new eyes now.
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