Moodie, Susanna: Life in the Clearings versus the Bush

SUSANNA MOODIE was born Susanna Strickland in Bungay, Suffolk, England, in 1803. The sixth and final daughter of a retired dock manager, she grew up in a middle-class family that encouraged the children in reading and in writing. Susanna's juvenilia include poetry and many fiction tales for young adults.     In 1831 Susanna Strickland married John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a military officer who had returned to England from South Africa to explore publication projects and to find a wife. A year later, they emigrated to Upper Canada (Ontario). For their first seventeen months in Canada, the Moodies lived on cleared farmland near Port Hope, and later on a bush farm in Douro Township, north of Peterborough. Roughing It in the Bush (1852), describes their life in these two backwoods areas.     Susanna Moodie died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1885.