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Sisters in the Wilderness Reading Guide

About the Book
Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie are icons of the Canadian imagination. Yet most of what we know of these two English gentlewomen, who spent their adult lives struggling to survive in Britain’s hardscrabble colony, comes from their own self-consciously crafted writings and from other writers’ sometimes fanciful depictions of them. But what were the women behind the authorial voices really like?

About the Author
Charlotte Gray is an award-winning journalist based in Ottawa. Her book Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King was nominated for a 1998 Governor General’s Award and won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Sisters in the Wilderness won the Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award in the non-fiction category.

1. At the beginning of Sisters in the Wilderness, Charlotte Gray discusses the way Catharine and Susanna have been portrayed — in both fiction and non-fiction – by Canadian authors, and how those portrayals have shaped our perception of the sisters. What was your perception of the sisters before you read the book? Has it now changed in any way?
   
   
2. Early in her marriage, Susanna describes her husband as “my guardian Angel. I seem to lose my own identity to him, and become indifferent to every thing [sic] else in the world…my heart will never grow old or cold to him.” Did her feelings change over the long years of isolation and hardship in Upper Canada?
   
   
3. When Catharine and Susanna said goodbye to their mother and sisters in England, do you think they truly realized they would never see them again? And if so, what would have impelled them to take such a dramatic and final journey?
   
   
4. Although Thomas Traill and John Moodie had many good qualities, neither were very capable men, especially under the harsh conditions of life in Upper Canada. If Catharine and Susanna had married different men — men more similar to their brother, Samuel, for example — how would their lives have been different?
   
   
5. Try to imagine the sisters’ reactions to the reality — as opposed to the romantic fantasy of many Europeans — of Upper Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. Just how different would it have been? Had anything in their lives prepared them for the challenges ahead?
   
   
6. The author describes Catharine as being able “to make the best of anything.” Can you give examples? Can you contrast this with Susanna’s attitude to life?
   
   
7. Had Catharine and Susanna remained in England, what kinds of writers would they have become? How did their struggle for survival affect their writing?
   
   
8. The author describes life in Upper Canada as not only “back breaking” but also “soul destroying.” To what degree does the second adjective pertain to Catharine and Susanna? What about their husbands?
   
   
9. At the end of their lives, do you think Susanna and Catharine had become reconciled to life in Canada? Had it become “home” to them?
   
   
10. Just how significant are the sisters as figures in Canadian literature? As figures in Canadian history?
    
    
11. A Question of Detail: After which historical figure, thought to be an ancestor of the Strickland family, was Catharine named?
    

“Sisters in the Wilderness is a meticulously researched historical account graced with the narrative drive, elegant prose, and complex characters of an accomplished novel.” — Maclean’s

“A superb biography…In this evocative book [Gray] juxtaposes the opposing personalities of the intrepid sisters with the common experiences they endured as they battled for survival, both as pioneer wives and as aspiring authors…a richly detailed and wonderfully written account.” — The London Free Press

“Charlotte Gray’s achievement is to make [Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie] live vividly on the page and to enlist our sympathies on their behalf, even as she sets out their often exasperating foibles.” — The Gazette (Montreal)