The Journals of Susanna Moodie

by Margaret Atwood, Charles Pachter (Illustrator)

Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), regarded by many as her most fully realized volume of poetry, is one of the great Canadian and feminist epics. In 1980, Margaret Atwood's longtime friend, the distinguished Canadian artist Charles Pachter, illustrated, designed, and published a handmade boxed portfolio edition of 120 copies of the poem with silkscreen prints, created as an act of homage to the poet. Atwood herself has said of Pachter's work, "His is a sophisticated art which draws upon many techniques and evokes many echoes." The poem and the prints inspire one another. This is the first facsimile edition of the original, as well as the first one-volume American edition of the poem, with an introduction by Charles Pachter and a foreword by David Staines.

Genres: Poetry, Canada, Fiction, Historical Fiction, School, Canadian Literature, Art

80 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.

Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth ­ in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she co-invented the Long Pen TM.

Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.

Associations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Margaret Atwood at her best.

In this work, Atwood re-imagines the Canadian landscape through the eyes of one of Canada's first settlers, Susanna Moodie (1803-1885). The collection of poems, Atwood writes, were generated by a dream. "I dreamt I was watching an opera in the theatre: on the empty white stage, a single figure was singing."

The book presents a physical presence of absence, if you can imagine the meaning of it: a small book, with plenty of white space, and a small white voice on each page, resounding as clear as a clarion call across the bleak landscape. Atwood's dream incarnate.

Within the book, a few dozen poems and a few thousand words, at best, describe all the lives Susanna lived: from a comfortable class-conscious gentlewoman of the Strickland family in England, to a hinterland trailblazer in the wilds of Canada; and in the end, to writer of pioneer literature, a trailblazer of a different kind.

Atwood slices through all the layers: gentlewoman, pioneer, writer while she manages to capture the soul of a gentlewoman, captive in this harsh land. How harsh is the plight of the immigrant soul, in the end: when one relinquishes everything one has ever known and held dear in order to carve a different life from alien soil. Impossible to imagine at its deepest level. While we can comprehend the conditions, from a physical perspective, would we ever understand what it did to the soul? The wilderness, Atwood writes, is within and without. In order to survive, and prosper, one needs to reconcile the two, or all is lost; perhaps lost in madness. It takes the heart of a poet to understand that.

Further Arrivals

After we had crossed the long illness
that was the ocean, we sailed up river

On the first island
the immigrants threw off their clothes
and danced like sandflies

We left behind one by one
the cities rotting with cholera,
one by one our civilized
distinctions

and entered a large darkness.

It was our own
ignorance we entered.

I have not come out yet

My brain gropes nervous
tentacles in the night, sends out
fears hairy as bears,
demands lamps; or waiting

for my shadowy husband, hears
malice in the trees' whispers.

I need wolf's eyes to see
the truth.

I refuse to look in a mirror.

Whether the wilderness is
real or not
depends on who lives there.

[Marianne Barron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nå har jeg lest Roughing it in the Bush av Susanna Moodie før denne diktsamlingen. Det kan være en fordel. Atwood har klart, i få men effektive dikt, å gjenskape følelsen til pioneerkvinnen Moodie da hun kom til Canada for første gang og ble i 7 år. Anbefales nok helst til dem som har lest Moodie, selv om Atwood i etterordet skriver at det ikke er nødvendig å lese Moodie først. Sikkert ikke nødvendig, men jeg ser jeg fikk mye mer ut av diktene med bakgrunnen i sekken. Kanskje fordi jeg ikke er såå bevandret i poesiens verden? God, sånn erre bare!

[Thibaut · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comme le précédent recueil de poèmes de Margaret Atwood que j’ai lu, celui-ci m’a également été offert par une amie de la famille qui est la traductrice française de l’auteure, pour la poésie.

Il est composé de 28 poèmes, tous présentés dans un format bilingue (en version originale anglaise et en français), qui relatent la vie de Susanna Moodie, une pionnière venue d’Angleterre pour émigrer au Canada au XIXème siècle.

L’articulation du recueil suit la chronologie de sa vie : de son arrivée au Québec, des souvenirs de ses années passées dans la forêt canadienne, à son dernier voyage vers la vieillesse, la mort et l’au-delà.

J’ai trouvé que la forme poétique rendait l’histoire assez intemporelle, facilitant ainsi les liens avec les migrations actuelles. J’ai beaucoup apprécié cette lecture, moi-même désireux d’émigrer prochainement au Canada, à Montréal, pour quelque temps.

[b (incognito) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for my Canadian Poetry class in one sitting. The language is absolutely beautiful and Atwood is great at reinventing narratives. Excited to hear what my professor and peers have to say, I’m intrigued to know more about Moodie

[Jillian Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This was an incredible experience. I loved everything about this book. It was gifted to me by a really good friend which makes this all the more personal and wonderful. The illustrations were haunting and full of emotion. I loved how natural and fulfilling the artwork felt throughout. Her words were sad, true, and wise. Will be reading this one again and again.

[JennieWithTheBooks☮️(◕‿◕✿) · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my opinion, this remarkable book has given me an intimate and moving interpretation of Susanna Moodie's pioneering years in the Canadian wilderness from 1832-1839.

Atwood's power of sight (or insight) helped to channel the “feelings” of how difficult and alienating pioneer life must have been for new immigrants to this vast Canadian geography in the earlier parts of the 19th century. These poems had me wondering if Moodie suffered from mental health issues before she immigrated from England to Canada or did her schizophrenia develop has a result of so many years of living out in the “myth” of the wilderness? When one has too much time on their hands to think of their hardships and the negative aspects of what they “feel” they've lost or left behind…hmm…

Atwood's depiction of Susanna, as we the reader find her throughout the journals, seems to indeed be a victim of paranoid schizophrenia.
In Journal 1, Atwood describes Susanna as she first arrives on Canadian land. At this point, she is fully formed by reason, civilization, and man-made order. When she encounters the world of nature, where man's definitions of good and bad and order and chaos no longer exist to the way in which she had been previously accustomed to, she begins to be psychologically tormented it seems.
In Journal 2, Atwood presents Susanna as she reaches a kind of comprehension of the nature of the duality from which she suffered in Journal 1, and she realizes how and why she has adapted to the physical environment of Canada.
Finally, in Journal 3, Atwood gives us a fully self-conscious Susanna, one who tells us that she is now able to communicate to the rest of society what she has learned about man's destructive refusal to abandon his reason-dominated ways of perceiving all things that surround him.

It definitely felt like a book of poems about man's/woman's consciousness.

The structure of the poems seems to me to be based upon a psychological form of madness to sanity, a journey for Moodie which consisted of the existence of an unhealthy duality in society between the conscious and the unconscious, reason and emotion, mind and body, civilization and nature, men and women. It seemed like Atwood believes that modern man has repressed his animal nature and exalted his reason, she often allegorizes this journey into the unconscious in terms of an actual physical journey into the Canadian wilderness. Consequently, she finds in the experiences of Mrs. Moodie the perfect metaphor for a psychic journey in search of the self-knowledge that is necessary to achieve the integrated personal self.

I, without a doubt, wish that I had of been fortunate enough to have taken a few literature course in my younger years, if for no other reason than to have gained a better understanding of how to interpret poetry. Regardless of that, I enjoyed this boiled-down version of poems based on Moodie’s journals.

Of them all…the following one went beyond “ my sight”… something about it goes “DEEPER”…
...................................................

WISH: METAMORPHOSIS TO HERALDIC EMBLEM by Margaret Atwood

I balance myself carefully
inside my shrinking body
which is nevertheless
deceptive as a cat’s fur:

when I am dipped in the earth
I will be much smaller.

On my skin the wrinkles branch
out, overlapping like hair or feathers.
In this parlour my grandchildren
uneasy on sunday chairs
with my deafness, my cameo brooch
my puckered mind
scurrying in its old burrows

little guess how
maybe

I will prowl and slink
in crystal darkness
among the stalactite roots, with new
formed plumage
uncorroded
gold and

Fiery green, my fingers
curving and scaled, my

opal
no
eyes glowing

...................................................

Now that it's all said and read, I’m giving this pint size book 3½ Stars.

[Rachel Stienberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of poetry was my white whale ever since I heard of it, and I did manage to find it during the pandemic... and promptly never read it until now. (Yikes.)

This is beautiful. I think it's an incredible fragment of Canadian/Ontario history, the experience of settling the area from a woman's point of view. Margaret Atwood uses Susanna Moodie's original narrative to create something more theatrical which is such a neat way to amplify voice. I really wish this book made it onto course material when I was in university. It cuts down any romanticized notion of what immigrating to Canada was like and really reshapes the process from the homemaker's POV.

"'go back where you came from'
I tightened my lips; knew that England
was now unreachable, had sunk down into the sea
without ever teaching me about washtubs.)"

The artwork was a final element that made this such a beautiful testimony. A lot of work went into recrafting this history and I'm so glad it once sat on a dusty used bookstore shelf waiting for me to find it.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

SFPL big book sale 2017.

that. was weird? interesting. but weird. I don't read a lot of poetry. everytime I do, I wish I was taking a class on it because I cannot, for the life of me, extract all the packed meaning that I ASSUME exists beneath the surface. I have taken English lit classes that study poetry in any case and I remember that being the result.

this poetry is supposedly inspired by a dream Atwood had about this early Canadian settler named Susanna Moodie. Moodie wrote two books about being a Canadian pioneer. Atwood read them once and then a couple years later decided to condense her impressions and her own consciousness into poetic derivatives of Moodie's life.

her life seems troubled and difficult beset by other settlers, the wilderness, fire, and death. the writing is haunting and mournful. there are some lines that are stand out beautiful.

I've never read Moodie's books and probably never will but I very much appreciated encountering her in this form.

[Allie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Edition note: This is a review of The Journals of Susanna Moodie read by Mia Anderson, produced by CBC radio's Anthology in 1969. I also wrote a review of the illustrated edition too which I liked much better.

I really love this poetry, but this reading leaves a lot to be desired. I loved listening to Margaret Atwood read her own poetry, but this is definitely being read as a capital-P Performance and it's a little much. I much prefer reading the text.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be the CliffsNotes to Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush. Since that book is over 600 pages of chopping wood and dealing with the relentless wind, I feel like this poetry collection is a good alternative.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I planted him in this country
like a flag.

[Tar Buendía · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se lee en un suspiro y tiene frases muy potentes. Me ha gustado e impactado bastante más de lo que esperaba.

I am a word
in a foreign language.

[charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

for my postcolonial lit class. had my moment in the sun when my sort of scary very brilliant prof asked if anyone follows margaret atwood on instagram 🙋‍♀️

[kdburton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good poems! Reading the Afterward first would have made them even better.

— the Peacocke’s collection

[dorran · Rating 4 out of 5]

“...along the paths
I orbit
the apple trees
white white spinning
stars around me

i am being
eaten away by light.”



this is just beautiful—margaret atwood’s writing, that is.

imagining poems from one of canada’s first settlers is such a cool idea and this executed so well. not to mention the art throughout which is also stunning.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Afterword, Margaret Atwood states: "These poems were generated by a dream. I dreamt that I was watching an opera I had written about Susanna Moodie. I was alone in the theatre: on the empty white stage, a single figure was singing." And later, about her poems: "I suppose many of these were suggested by Mrs. Moodie's books, though it was not her conscious voice, but the other voice running like a counterpoint through her work that made the most impression on me."

THE JOURNALS OF SUSANNA MOODIE is divided into three "Journals". The first journal spans 1832 - 1840, the years described by the real life Susanna Moodie in her book ROUGHING IT IN THE BUSH; the second journal spans 1840 - 1871; and the third journal spans the years 1871 - 1969, surpassing the death of Susanna Moodie (8 April 1885). In the words of Margaret Atwood: "After her death she can hear the twentieth century above her, bulldozing away her past, but she refuses to be ploughed under completely.... Susanna Moodie has finally turned herself inside out, and has become the spirit of the land she once hated."

Atwood states that "Most of Journal III was written after I had come across a little-known photograph of Susanna Moodie as a mad-looking and very elderly lady." In addition to Journal II, the photograph in question seems to have influenced some of the earlier poems - in particular, an unnamed poems that precedes Journal I: "I take this picture of myself / and with my sewing scissors / cut out the face. / Now it is more accurate: / where my eyes were, / every- / thing appears" - as well as the artwork that appears throughout the book. The artwork is part collage and part watercolour, lending to a divide that Atwood Acknowledges in the afterword...

"Susanna Moodie is divided down the middle: she praises the Canadian landscape but accuses it of destroying her; she dislikes the people already in Canada but finds in people her only refuge from the land itself; she preaches progress and the march of civilization while brooding elegiacally upon the destruction of the wilderness; she delivers optimistic sermons while showing herself to be fascinated with deaths, murders, the criminals in Kingston Penitentiary and the incurably insane in the Toronto lunatic asylum."

Atwood refers to Moodie's fascination with the "incurably insane in the Toronto lunatic asylum" in one of her poems, VISIT TO TORONTO, WITH COMPANIONS, a poem that begins: "The streets are new, the harbour / is new also; / the lunatic asylum is yellow." Unlikely that Atwood could have discerned the colour of the lunatic asylum from a B&W photograph or an account. More likely she used the opportunity to reference THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, a feminist text that directly addresses madness or "hysteria".

With her novels (such as THE EDIBLE WOMAN and THE HANDMAID'S TALE) Atwood has been categorized (or marginalized) as a Feminist writer. She is a Feminist writer, and this is proud title. Otherwise I have trouble (perhaps because I haven't read enough) placing her among the Modernists or Postmodernists - in part because her writing career began in the 1960s, that grey area between Modernism and Postmosernism.

THE JOURNAL OF SUSANNA MOODIE is in many ways a postmodern text: the appropriation and re-interpretation of an existing text (the writings of Susanna Moodie); the abstraction of form (a poetry collection disguised as a journal); the premise that the book is another book written by another author - though the epistolary form is pre-modern, often used in "Gothic" novels (in fact, Margaret Atwood has been labelled a "Gothic" writer grouped among other Canadian writers as "Southern Ontario Gothic"), what distinguishes the text from Gothic novels and poems is this premise, that the author is not a character but someone living (or dead), as in the case of Gertrude Stein AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS (though the texts may be a departure in form and execution, and certainly to a different effect, the respective authors share a veil, a veil that detaches and distances them from the subject - all the more pertinent in the case of Gertrude Stein, who is the subject of THE AUTHOBIOGRAPHY...)

The closest comparison to THE JOURNAL OF SUSANNA MOODIE is Michael Ondaatje's THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID. The name alone betrays a similarity. Both authors have chosen an existing person to serve as a conduit for a strange poetic undertaking. What's remarkable is the fact that both poetry collections were published in the same year (1970). Atwood and Ondaatje seem to have been possessed by the same inspiration that would eventually elevate both writers to international acclaim.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been meaning to read this for a while and have finally got around to it, and I wish I'd read it sooner, because it's fantastic. The poems affect me more than the art, which I probably wouldn't enjoy so much if it were presented in another context, but the marriage between text and art here really does work... there's something very striking about the images, which are layered and confronting and work with the poems to form a complete and disturbing impression.

There is, I think, a tendency to romanticise early settler life from our life of electricity and relative ease. I'm not just talking about the ethical aspects of colonialism, but the day to day backbreaking labour of clearing land and planting and trying to impose a left-behind landscape onto the one that's in front of you. I've felt that nostalgic glow very occasionally, but never for long. I like indoor plumbing and hot water and washing machines too much to deceive myself into feeling that I'd enjoy a frontier life, and Susanna's own disgust with the whole horrible process is fair enough, I reckon.

Part of me now wants to go and read the actual journals that inspired Atwood to write this collection, but given her (Atwood's) opinion that they weren't actually that interesting, from a literary point of view, I have to wonder if sticking to the impression might be more valuable than the primary source: there's something brutally honest about this collection, something that may in the end be a more accurate impression of the times. I especially liked, of all the excellent poems, "The Bush Garden," which reflects on how all these new plantings are underpinned by blood welling up out of the soil. Horrifyingly compelling.

[Peter Longden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Day 4
#thesealeychallenge
Susanna Moodie emigrated from England to Upper Canada in 1832 and write several books. ‘The Journals…’ follow Moodie from arrival through 7 years in the bush in which she confronts the expanse of wilderness, its isolation and, perhaps still poignant at a time of immigration as a central political issue for western politics, the feelings of dislocation and alienation, and treatment as a stranger (in ‘First Neighbours’ she is ‘jeered…for her burned bread’ and told to ‘Go back where you came from’).
Margaret (so familiar to call her by first name only, but hopefully she won’t mind) paints extraordinary pictures with her metaphor and simile, such as these from ‘Further Arrivals’: ‘the long illness/that was the ocean’ and ‘fears hairy as bears’. We are taken through a fascinating journey from wilderness to a growing civilisation in which Susanna becomes ‘the spirit of the land she once hated.’
What a gem of a book that I think I picked up in an Oxfam shop in Crouch End!

[Catherine Brissette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vraiment intéressant de voir l’interprétation qu’a faite Atwood de l’histoire de Susanna Moodie. J’ai été touchée par la vie de cette immigrante arrivant au Canada au 19e siècle et Atwood traduit bien la dualité de cette vie d’immigrante: c’est dur, c’est violent, tout en étant empreint d’espoir et d’émerveillement. Je n’ai pas apprécié ni bien compris tous les poèmes, mais j’ai bien senti la violence et la colère omniprésentes même quand le sens m’échappait. Je dois toutefois souligner que certains poèmes m’ont beaucoup plus, mon préféré étant "Later in Belleville : career". Pour terminer, les poèmes ne constitueraient pas un livre d’artiste sans l’apport des magnifiques illustrations de Charles Pachter, qui ont été spécialement créées pour donner vie aux mots et pour compléter l’ambiance ressentie à la lecture des poèmes. Très méditatif et comme lecture.

[Nour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant! This poetry collection is just absolutely brilliant. Margaret Atwood's ability to so vividly depict a character and take you along her entire life journey within just a mere 60 something pages is incredible. These poems comment on colonisation, the political environment of the 1800s, one woman's views on the society she lives in, her complicated relationship with the land she inhabits and her torn view of her surroundings. It highlights her tragedies and her unravelling mind as she grows older. The depiction of all these themes is so well phrased and woven into the story these poems bring forth and the complementarity of the accompanying collages to highlight the contrast of Susanne Moodie's life is fantastic. Highly recommended read.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to say if this is 3 or 4 stars in my book. An excellent, short collection of poems reflecting on the life and times of Susanna Moodie, a British woman who emigrates to Canada and lives in the bush for years with her husband and family. I read this initially because it's related to the Alias Grace story. The poems stay with you and I had to remind myself that they weren't really written by Susanna Moodie but by Margaret Atwood imaging Moodie's life and experiences as she wrote about them in her diaries. I was left wanting more of the story than just the darkness and dirt of the poems but that could be considered a good thing.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 25th anniversary facsimile edition of the original silk-screened, limited run of "The Journals of Susanna Moodie" is a beautiful book to read. There are no page numbers so you just get lost in Atwood's evocative poetry and Pachter's gorgeous illustrations.

How do you describe a fictionalize biography written in poetry? Because that is what Atwood has done here--she has taken the life of Susanna Moodie, a renown Canadian pioneer--and turned it into a story known to all women. The story of life: when marriage removes agency, pulls you across countries, and decides your fate.

[Cheriee Weichel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this gem on a bookshelf in the flea market today. I was looking for logging history but is soon as I read the first poem I knew I had to have this one. How’s this for a poem ending?
“I am a word
In a foreign language.”
An added bonus is that in the margins, someone before me penciled in notes about the poems.
Margaret Atwood writes these poems from the perspective of one of Canada’s most famous pioneers. Now I think I’m going to have to find and read Susanna Moodie’s real journals.

[Barbara McEwen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no idea what makes good poetry and have no right to rate it but I found this a very enjoyable collection. It was a cohesive collection, you can feel the theme running through it. I like Margaret Atwood's thoughts at the end too. I appreciate learning where the author was coming from. A pleasant experience for me.

[Soyee · Rating 4 out of 5]

JSM was originally a book that I was obligated to read for a class. As we analyzed each poem for poetic devices, I was enthralled by the way Atwood portrayed Susanna Moodie's struggle living in an unfamiliar land that eventually becomes her home. At times, I can still remember each of my classmate's analysis of each poem and their own interpretations of Atwood's writing.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can’t tell if it was actually good or if I’m stuck on my own Canada/Suffolk connection. And because any Atwood poetry collection that includes Death of a Young Son by Drowning automatically gets an extra star.

[Alannis Flese · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Patricia Snell · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent...through the pictures and poems I felt like I was there and felt the suffering...

[Heidi Bakk-Hansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful illustrated edition, and lovely reading.

[Bored · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atwood turns one immigrant’s story into astounding poetry. This experience is just as relevant today as it was when she penned these poems.