Susanna Moodie

Susanna Moodie – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Explore the life, trials, and enduring legacy of Susanna Moodie (1803–1885). From her English roots to life as a Canadian settler-writer, learn about her works, influence, and memorable lines.

Introduction

Susanna Moodie (born Susanna Strickland, 6 December 1803 – died 8 April 1885) was a British-born author whose writings about settler life in early Canada became foundational texts in Canadian literature. Though she emigrated under hopeful expectation, she endured hardship, disillusionment, and adaptation—and chronicled those experiences with rigor, irony, and lyrical insight. Her books offer more than frontier memoirs: they probe identity, colonialism, gender, and survival. Over time, Moodie’s voice and perspective have influenced generations of writers and scholars, and her most famous work, Roughing It in the Bush, remains a classic of narrative non-fiction.

Though she experienced difficulties and relative obscurity in her later years, the reappraisal of her work in the 20th century has elevated her as a canonical and complex voice.

Personality and Talents

From her letters, journals, and public writings, we can infer key traits and gifts:

• Honest and unromantic: She did not sugarcoat difficulties; she faced harsh realities with candor.

• Observant and detailed: Her descriptions of climate, vegetation, wildlife, and daily tasks are meticulous.

• Wry irony: She often frames suffering with dark humor or ironic commentary, resisting sentimentality.

• Resilient: Despite adversity, she continued writing and adapting.

• Moral sensibility: Her engagement with abolition, social justice, and personal ethics shows concern beyond self.

• Memory and reflection: She dwells on how past and recollection shape identity, implying introspective depth.

Her literary voice reveals someone both grounded and imaginative, aware of the limits of language yet persistent in her attempt to represent complex experience.

Famous Quotes of Susanna Moodie

Here are selected quotes reflecting her insight, tone, and moral imagination:

“Ah, Hope! what would life be, stripped of thy encouraging smiles, that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of today, for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow.”

“When things come to the worse, they generally mend.”

“I have no wish for a second husband. I had enough of the first. I like to have my own way to lie down mistress, and get up master.”

“Nature, reason, and Christianity recognize no other. Pride may say Nay; but Pride was always a liar, and a great hater of the truth.”

“The Canadian people are more practical than imaginative. Romantic tales and poetry would meet with less favour in their eyes than a good political article from their newspapers.”

“What a wonderful faculty is memory! — the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on which the Almighty registers … making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds — this faithful witness against us for good or evil.”

These quotes reveal her mixture of pragmatism, spiritual reflection, irony, and moral concern.

Lessons from Susanna Moodie

From Moodie’s life and writing, we can derive several enduring lessons:

1. Unromantic honesty has power
   Her refusal to idealize settler life made her voice credible and lasting.

2. Voice grows from adversity
   It was in the bush, the struggles, the discomfort, that Moodie’s distinctive literary voice emerged.

3. Memory shapes identity
   She recognized that how we recollect and narrate the past influences who we become.

4. The observer’s moral responsibility
   She engaged social and ethical issues (slavery, reform, gender), refusing to remain passive.

5. Adaptation does not mean capitulation
   While she moved to Belleville and changed her environment, she preserved her critical outlook.

6. Legacy is mysterious
   For much of her life, Moodie struggled for recognition; it was only later, through reinterpretation, that her influence expanded—reminding us that significance may emerge over time.

Conclusion

Susanna Moodie was more than a settler memoirist: she was a chronicler of frontier life, a moral witness, and a literary craftsman whose works probe the intersections of identity, displacement, memory, and nature. Her writing gave voice to the uncertainties of emigrant life and questioned romantic colonial narratives from within.

Today, Moodie endures as a crucial figure in Canadian literary history and as a voice for writers who seek to tell real, difficult stories. Her life reminds us that the truest art often grows out of discomfort, reflection, and insistence on honesty.

If you’d like a deeper analysis of Roughing It in the Bush, or a critical reading of her novels or poetry, I’d be happy to prepare it.