Atwood’s Re-Creation of Pioneer Susanna Moodie in The Journals of Susanna Moodie

Mrs. Moodie is divided down the middle . . . She claims to be an ardent Canadian patriot while all the time she is standing back from the country and criticizing it as though she were a detached observer, a stranger. Perhaps that is the way we still live. We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here: the country is too big for anyone to inhabit completely, and in the parts unknown to us we move in fear, exiles and invaders.[i] Continue reading →

There is an unspeakable outside, an imagined asocial space, where something howls beyond the edges, prowls in anguish around the dark perimeter encircling the glowing campfire of the family.[i] Continue reading →