Susanna Moodie

Born Susanna Strickland in Suffolk, England, in 1803, she grew up in a literary family and began writing while still young. In 1832 she married J.W.D. Moodie, and the following year they emigrated to what was then Upper Canada, an experience that would shape her most enduring work.

Moodie wrote poetry, children's stories, and sketches, but she is especially known for Roughing It in the Bush and Life in the Clearings versus the Bush. Those books drew on her years as a settler and offered readers a lively, sometimes unsparing picture of frontier life, making her an important early chronicler of immigrant experience in Canada.

She died in 1885, but her writing has continued to matter because it is personal, observant, and full of detail. Readers often return to her not just for history, but for the human voice behind it: intelligent, determined, and often wryly funny.