Susanna Moodie (née Strickland; 6 December 1803 – 8 April 1885) was an English-born Canadian author who wrote about her experiences as a settler in Canada, which was a British colony at the time.
Family
Susanna Moodie was born in Bungay, on the River Waveney in Suffolk. She was the youngest sister in a family of writers, including Agnes Strickland, Jane Margaret Strickland, and Catharine Parr Traill.
Early career
She wrote her first children's book in 1822 and published other children's stories in London, including books about Spartacus and Jugurtha. In London she was also involved in the abolitionist organization Anti-Slavery Society, transcribing the narrative of the former Caribbean slave Mary Prince.
Marriage and move to Upper Canada
On 4 April 1831, she married John Moodie, a retired officer who had served in the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1832, with her husband, a British Army officer, and daughter, Moodie immigrated to Upper Canada. The family settled on a farm in Douro township, near Lakefield, north of Peterborough, where her brother Samuel Strickland (1804–1867) worked as a surveyor, and where artifacts are housed in a museum. Founded by Samuel, the museum was formerly an Anglican church and overlooks the Otonabee River where Susanna once canoed. It also displays artifacts concerning Samuel, as well as her elder sister and fellow writer Catharine, who married a friend of John Moodie's and immigrated to the same area a few weeks before Susanna and John.
Moodie continued to write in Canada, and her letters and journals contain valuable information about life in the colony. She observed life in what was then the backwoods of Ontario, including native customs, the climate, the wildlife, relations between the Canadian population and recent American settlers, and the strong sense of community and the communal work, known as "bees" (which she, incidentally, hated). She suffered through the economic depression in 1836, and her husband served in the militia against William Lyon Mackenzie in the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837.
