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Roughing It In The Bush

Average rating: 4/5

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Roughing It In The Bush

by Susanna Moodie
Foreword by: Charlotte Gray

Penguin Group Canada | July 28, 2006 | Hardcover

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHARLOTTE GRAY

Roughing It in the Bush, first published in 1852, helped to destroy British illusions about life in Upper Canada. Susanna Moodie described a life of backbreaking labour, poverty, and hardship on a pioneer farm in the colonial wilderness. Her sharp observations, satirical character sketches, and moments of despair and terror were a startling contrast to the widely circulated optimistic accounts of life in British North America, written to entice readers across the Atlantic.

The spontaneity, wit, and candour of Moodie's account of life on a backwoods farm give Roughing It in the Bush enduring appeal.

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    Rating: 2/5

    Great, Important, Boring

    Judekyle

    • Author

    3 years ago

    Roughing it in the Bush is one of those books that is undeniably important (within its own limited sphere of influence). But it is also way more important than it is readable.

    As an icon of Canadian Literature, Susanna Moodie has particular importance for Feminist Canadian writers. Her work has directly inspired many Canadian memoirs by women, and Margaret Atwood, one of Canada's most honoured writers, found inspiration in it for her poetry cycle, The Journals of Susanna Moodie.

    But Moodie's memoir, Roughing it in the Bush, is an excruciating read. Moodie was a bourgeois English woman who immigrated to Upper Canada with her military husband, retired after the Napoleonic Wars. Roughing it in the Bush details the "immigrant experience" as Moodie sees it, and one is unlikely to find a more bitter, whiny, unsavory expression of an immigrant's tribulations anywhere else in literature.

    Moodie complains about everything. She hates the weather, she hates the work, she hates the lack of culture, and she hates life. And all I could think when I read her whining, and all I can still think, is "Waaaah, waaaah! Suck it up!"

    Moodie was a spoiled, miserable woman -- at least during the period she covers in Roughing it in the Bush -- and I, for one, found it almost impossible to sympathize with her.

    Add to that the fact that Moodie's writing style, very much of her time and place in the world, was painfully boring, and you can imagine the joy this book can bring to anyone who reads it from cover to cover.

    Had I not been reading this for a course, and had I not chosen to write my final essay on Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie (which I much prefer), I never would have finished Roughing it in the Bush.

    And yes, I hated it, but I am giving Roughing it in the Bush a second leaf simply because it is important, and I can't deny Moodie's place in Canadian literary history.

    But still...ugh!

    This reviewer also recommends:
    Comments on this review:
    Judekyle

    ...to continue...Ivan Denisovitch, in Solzhenitsyn's classic (a thinly fiction-veiled autobiography of Solzhenitsyn's time in a Gulag), is faced with far greater privation than Moodie, but he doesn't whine, he doesn't make us cringe with his moaning about the horrors of his life, he gives us hope, and he, too, comes from a middle class background, unused to hard physical labour. While I agree it is important to consider the period from which a work of art comes, I don't think the period can excuse Moodie's behavior (I know plenty of Moodies today). And even in her day, she was criticized for the negativity of her book because it was perceived as an attack on immigration, a piece designed to keep immigrants away.

    Judekyle

    Thanks for taking the time to comment on my posting, Lorina. I am not so sure my prejudices towards Moodie's work are "modern," however, although even if they are I think they remain valid complaints. I don't dispute the importance of her work, but to a "modern sensibility" or even the sensibility of someone who comes from a farming or blue collar family (from which I do come, and I believe that is where my annoyance with Moodie stems), Roughing it in the Bush is a slog, and Moodie is insufferable and unforgivably so....

    Lorina Stephens/Five Rivers

    When reading Moodie's book, or any historical book, it is important to leave aside our modern prejudices and try to read from the attitude of the time-period. Did she whine? Yes. Was it justified? Likely. Having, in part, lived frequently in that milieu, adopted the dress, mannerisms, technologies and partial privations, I can attest life was hard. Unbearably so. And given she was a woman of gentle birth, with no preparation for the hardships of the backwoods, it is perhaps unfair to say 'Suck it up!' Until a person has walked in her shoes, especially in the winter, facing depredations of Yankee neighbours little say the environment, one cannot really begin to appreciate what our forebears endured.

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From the Publisher

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHARLOTTE GRAY

Roughing It in the Bush, first published in 1852, helped to destroy British illusions about life in Upper Canada. Susanna Moodie described a life of backbreaking labour, poverty, and hardship on a pioneer farm in the colonial wilderness. Her sharp observations, satirical character sketches, and moments of despair and terror were a startling contrast to the widely circulated optimistic accounts of life in British North America, written to entice readers across the Atlantic.

The spontaneity, wit, and candour of Moodie's account of life on a backwoods farm give Roughing It in the Bush enduring appeal.

About the Author

Susanna Moodie was born in Suffolk, England, in 1803. In 1831, she married John Moodie, a retired officer who had served in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1832, the Moodies and their infant daughter emigrated to Canada. Susanna's older sister Catharine Parr Traill and her husband, Thomas Traill, arrived in Canada the same year. Moodie had been published widely before she left Britain, and she continued writing poetry and magazine articles after her arrival in the colony. Her letters and journals contain valuable information about colonial life in these early years of Canada. She is the author of a number of books, including Life in the Clearings; Mark Hurdlestone, the Gold Worshipper; and Matrimonial Speculations, but is best known for Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada. Moodie died in 1885 in Toronto, Ontario, at the home of her daughter.

Charlotte Gray is an award-winning journalist based in Ottawa. She is a contributing editor to Saturday Night magazine and a regular contributor to Chatelaine, Financial Post magazine and Report on Business magazine among others. 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.

Hardcover

544 Pages, 5.5 x 8.25 x 1.6 in

July 28, 2006

Penguin Group Canada

English


0670065056
9780670065059

From the Critics

"Roughing It in the Bush" is an extraordinarily detailed record of pioneer life. It is also a journey of exploration and revelation into Moodie's own character, as we watch her grow from ill-prepared immigrant to spirited survivor."
- Charlotte Gray

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