The Journals of Susanna Moodie

In 1832, a 29-year-old Englishwoman departed for Canada with her family. The product of a genteel upbringing, Susanna Moodie had already established somewhat of a reputation as a writer of essays, poetry and children's stories. None of this, however, prepared her for the rigours of pioneer life, which she chronicled in two volumes of autobiography and eventually came to cherish.

Moodie died in 1885, and, almost a century later, Margaret Atwood seized upon this quintessential pioneer as the subject for a verse epic. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Atwood uses Moodie's own words as raw material, reshaping and cutting them into a startling meditation on nature, alienation and our sense of place