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Margaret Atwood: The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)

By Faye Hammill (University of Strathclyde)

Indexing Data:

  • Domain: Literature.
  • Genre: Poem Collection.
  • Country: Canada, North America.

Life, Works and Times

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The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Margaret Atwood\'s third major volume of verse, was inspired by the writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (1803-1885), an English emigrant to Upper Canada. These are among Atwood\'s best-known poems, and they have exerted a very significant influence on later Canadian literature and literary criticism.

The book comprises a sequence of eighteen poems, divided into three Journals, together with a prose Afterword. They are loosely based on the sequence of events described in Susanna Moodie\'s autobiographical books Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853). Atwood\'s first Journal depicts Moodie\'s 1832 journey across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence, her

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Published 27 June 2003

Citation: Hammill, Faye. "The Journals of Susanna Moodie". The Literary Encyclopedia. 27 June 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=466, accessed 9 February 2010.]