author
Mrs. Charles Gerrard King
1810–1885
Best known for Letters from Muskoka, she turned the upheaval of war, widowhood, and emigration into a vivid first-hand account of settling in 19th-century Ontario. Her writing is valued for its clear eye, practical detail, and honest sense of what frontier life demanded.
1 Audiobook
Letters from Muskoka
by Mrs. Charles Gerrard King
About the author
Harriet Barbara King, published as Mrs. Charles Gerrard King, was an English-born writer also recorded as Harriet Barbara Durnford King. Project Gutenberg lists both Harriet Barbara Durnford and Harriet Barbara King as her names, and her best-known work is Letters from Muskoka, first published in London in 1878.
In the preface to that book, she explains that the Franco-German War of 1870 disrupted the home she had kept in the Calais area during fifteen years of widowhood. That experience led her and her family toward emigration, and Letters from Muskoka grew out of her first year in Muskoka, Ontario. The book is written from lived experience, mixing travel, settlement, hardship, and close observation of everyday life in the Canadian bush.
She appears to have died in Ontario in 1885. Today she is remembered mainly for Letters from Muskoka, a rare and readable personal record of migration and frontier settlement, and for the way it brings large historical events down to the scale of one family trying to begin again.