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Peterborough, Ontario is rich in pioneer women’s writings by British immigrants. I am fascinated that the wives, daughters, and mothers who immigrated to Upper Canada learned to cope and adapt to their lives in the colony, almost without exception. Faced with surviving -- or not -- they managed. Frances Stewart, her friend Catharine Parr Traill, Susanna Moodie, Harriet Pengelley, Isabella Miller, and Anne Langton, all women from Britain, arrived in the Peterborough area between 1822 and 1837.
Their letters and diaries provide evidence of lives lived in stark contrast to their pre-emigration experiences; the writings speak to class and reveal that memory, myth, and nostalgia figured prominently in their perceptions of their experiences in the new world.
How did our nation’s nineteenth-century women immigrants cope when they found themselves living in abject isolation on the opposite side of the Atlantic? Uprooted and living in isolation without the direct support of loved ones in the homeland, these women developed a strength and tenacity that figured in their abilities to nurture sometimes despondent husbands ill-suited to life in the Canadian bush, to educate their children, and, couched within the parameters of humble feminine demeanor, to exert influence in the community, all while experiencing intense feelings of loneliness and despair; for these immigrants, giving up was not an option.
I rely heavily on the transantlantic exchange of letters to inform my research. The unique private writings provide evidence of the malleable and ever-changing nature of the interconnections between gender, memory, concepts of landscape, place, and community, and literary representation. I am increasingly intrigued by the contrasting and complex representations of self, family, and community.
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