SOURCE: Thurston, John. “Roughing It in the Bush: A Case Study in Colonial Contradictions.” In The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie, pp. 133-66. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Thurston considers the composition, editing, and import of Roughing It in the Bush.

That Moodie dredges up recollections of her first years in Upper Canada when she first writes about it speaks of the emotional burden those years laid upon her. A desire to wrest meaning from her earliest experiences of the colony drives Roughing It in the Bush. It is as much an expression of her needs in the 1850s as a representation of her life in the 1830s. The pain charging her memories of Cobourg clearing and Douro bush comes partly from her nagging sense of that period as a void in the progress of her life. That suffering and trial...