This text provides a comprehensive examination and radical reassessment of the whole of Susanna Strickland Moodie's writing - poetry, short fiction, novels and non-fiction - and tries to overturn the myths that have cast her as pioneer heroine, one-woman garrison, or paranoid schizophrenic.

Susanna Strickland Moodie has been acknowledged as a key figure in pre-Confederation Canadian literature but most of her work has been overlooked or ignored by scholars and readers. This text provides an examination and a reassessment of the whole of Moodie's writing and tries to overturn the myths that have cast her as pioneer heroine, one-woman garrison, or paranoid schizophrenic. The author considers the whole of Moodie's literary output, including her poems, short fiction, novels and non-fiction, beginning with her youthful writing in England and culminating in an extensive analysis of her best-known work, "Roughing it in the bush". The text establishes the biographical foundations of Moodie's writing, using recently discovered correspondence, and describes the historical issues and events that shaped her life and writing. The author uses historicist and feminist literary criticism in his analysis of Moodie. Locating tensions of class, gender and race within her work, Moodie is placed in both the established tradition of 19th-century British women writers and the less-familiar tradition of North American class conflict.