Fariha Shaikh
King’s College London
In 1832, two sisters born and raised in Suffolk, Susanna Moodie and
Catherine Parr Traill emigrated to Canada with their husbands. In
England, both had been prolific writers of short stories and novellas
published in periodicals. In Canada, both continued forging their
careers through their writing endeavours. Lamenting the lack of an
established literary circle, Moodie began to publish in Canadian and
North American periodicals, such as the Albion, the Emigrant and Old
Countryman, the Coburg Star, the Canadian Literary Magazine, and the
Literary Garland, from almost the moment of her arrival. Importantly,
they did not relinquish their periodical publishing in England:
through the help of their sister in England, Agnes Strickland, Moodie
and Parr Traill published poems and fictional stories of settler life
in British journals such as Home Circle. This worked both ways:
through the help of Moodie, Agnes published her poems in the Canadian
Literary Garland.
This paper interrogates this moment of trans-Atlantic periodical
publishing that is produced and sustained by bonds of sisterhood. It
asks how periodical publishing produces networks of communities across
Canada and England. For Moodie and Parr Traill, periodical publishing
in Canada is integral to the formation of their emerging settler
identity. On the other hand, their periodical publishing in England
provided English readers with an imaginative space where they could
engage with the facts of settler life. This paper seeks to establish
how periodical publishing builds a colonial sensibility on both sides
of the Atlantic by establishing different fictional locales and
‘senses’ of place.