Catharine Parr Traill

A significant figure in nineteenth-century Canadian literature and history, Catharine Parr (Strickland) Traill is best known for The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer (1836) – an autobiographical account of her journey to, and pioneer experiences in, Upper Canada (what is today the province of Ontario). Traill was a prolific, diverse writer and her output includes instructive emigrant manuals, children's literature, a novel, and botanical texts. The didactic nature and often-scientific focus of Traill's writing have often deterred literary scholars from enthusiastically embracing her work. The result is that Traill's accomplishments are often overshadowed by those of her more widely studied an