If you've read Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, the historical fiction novel that describes a gruesome double murder in Canada in 1843, you would be interested to know the sources that were used by Atwood during her research. Life in the Clearings by Susanna Moodie was one such reference book in which the author, Susanna Moodie recounts her meeting with the infamous murderess Grace Marks, a young house help who was convicted to life imprisonment for her role in the slaying of her employers. Susanna Moodie was an Englishwoman born in Suffolk. Her two sisters were also writers. She wrote and published her first book of children's stories before she was twenty. Later, Moodie transcribed the narrative of a former Caribbean slave, Mary Price, as part of her involvement in the Anti-Slavery Society. She married a former military man who had served in the Napoleonic Wars and migrated to Canada in 1832. She continued to write about her life in the newly formed colonies there and today, these books are invaluable pieces of history that document a pioneering way of life. The customs, climate, wildlife and landscape as well as the social happenings of Upper Canada are brilliantly recorded in a series of journals, letters and biographical sketches that Moodie wrote to keep herself occupied and also to supplement the family income. Born into a relatively wealthy upper middle class English family, Moodie herself found life in the colony dull and hard and she did not find life in the "bush" as she called it, particularly enjoyable. When she and her family moved to a small town, Belleville, in Southeastern Ontario, this was much more to her liking. She called Belleville the "clearings." Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush to give the book's complete title is a sequel to an earlier volume that she titled Roughing it in The Bush which dealt with her struggle to maintain life on a remote Canadian farm. Roughing it in the Bush was an immediate success and became a ready reckoner for potential emigrants from Britain who were thinking of migrating to Canada. She meant it to be a frank and unromantic view of the tough life that new emigrants born in comfortable surroundings like herself would have to face in the new country. Life in the Clearings also served as inspiration for Margaret Atwood's 1970 collection of poems entitled The Journals of Susanna Moodie. In 2003 Moodie was honored by the government of Canada with a commemorative postage stamp. Life in the Clearings is indeed a remarkable document of a way of life that is now long gone...

'Roughing It in the Bush' is an account of life as a Canadian settler by Susanna Moodie. She immigrated to Upper Canada (soon to become Canada West), near modern-day Peterborough, Ontario during the 1830s. At the suggestion of her editor, she wrote a "guide" to settler life for British subjects considering coming to Canada. It was Moodie's most successful literary work. The work is part memoir, part novelization of her experiences, and is structured as a chronological series of sketches.

Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), regarded by many as her most fully realized volume of poetry, is one of the great Canadian and feminist epics. In 1980, Margaret Atwood's longtime friend, the distinguished Canadian artist Charles Pachter, illustrated, designed, and published a handmade boxed portfolio edition of 120 copies of the poem with silkscreen prints, created as an act of homage to the poet. Atwood herself has said of Pachter's work, His is a sophisticated art which draws upon many techniques and evokes many echoes. The poem and the prints inspire one another. This is the first facsimile edition of the original, as well as the first one-volume American edition of the poem, with an introduction by Charles Pachter and a foreword by David Staines.

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 in Britain’s harsh and vigorous 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? In Sisters in the Wilderness, award-winning author Charlotte Gray breathes life into two remarkable and fascinating characters and brings us a vivid picture of life in the backwoods of Upper Canada.

A compilation of letters originally written to her mother over the course of two and a half years, Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada is an intimate and telling look at pioneer life in Upper Canada. Originally published in 1836, Traill’s memoir details her journey with genuine charm and good cheer, even during difficult times. Thanks to its remarkable observations on Canadian class and economy, Traill’s story remains an important and essential telling of Canadian history. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

The new novel from the author of As We Have Always Done, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism In fierce prose and poetic fragments, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming braids together humor, piercing detail, and a deep, abiding commitment to Anishinaabe life to tell stories of resistance, love, and joy. Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering the sharpness of unmuted feeling from long ago, finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce the seven characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman, their conscience; Sabe, a gentle giant, their marrow; Adik, the caribou, their nervous system; and Asin and Lucy, the humans who represent their eyes, ears, and brain. Simpson’s book As We Have Always Done argued for the central place of storytelling in imagining radical futures. Noopiming (Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush”) enacts these ideas. The novel’s characters emerge from deep within Abinhinaabeg thought to commune beyond an unnatural urban-settler world littered with SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, and Fjällräven Kånken backpacks. A bold literary act of decolonization and resistance, Noopiming offers a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits—and the daily work of healing.

The Problematic Press edition of James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder features the following unique additions: * A Foreword by David Reynolds introduces the author and the novel. * Annotated end notes by David Reynolds reflect on interesting elements of the text and reference scholarly works. DESCRIPTION While playing a silly game, four bored yachtsmen find a mysterious copper cylinder bobbing along the sea. They soon discover the briny cylinder contains a massive script, a journal of sorts, detailing the adventures of Adam More, a sailor lost at sea. Examining the script reveals More's incredible story of drifting across the ocean, sailing to lost lands, encountering giant beasts, and meeting truly peculiar people. This is a satirical tale that is sure to entertain!