Susanna Moodie

Susanna Strickland Moodie was a prominent British-Canadian writer who emigrated to Upper Canada in 1832 with her husband, officer John Moodie. Arriving in the dense forests near Peterborough during the cholera epidemic, Moodie confronted the brutal physical realities and psychological isolation of pioneer settlement.

Her 1852 memoir, Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada, stripped away romantic colonial propaganda to depict the hardships, social conflicts, and natural majesty of the backwoods. Her work became a central touchstone of Canadian literature, celebrated famously in Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie.