Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Susanna Moodie: Roughing It in the Bush | 2016 | Carol Shields | Buy |
Carol Shields had a decades-long interest in Susanna Moodie, the British-born author who emigrated to Canada in 1832 and wrote about the harsh realities of pioneer life in her memoir Roughing It in the Bush. Shields wrote her doctoral thesis on Moodie and published an academic study, Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision, in 1977. That early scholarly work shaped her understanding of what it means to write truthfully about a life, an interest that runs through her later novels.
The 2016 graphic novel, published posthumously and based on Shields’s work, translates Moodie’s story into illustrated form. It brings together Shields’s engagement with a foundational Canadian literary figure and the visual possibilities of the graphic format. Readers with an interest in Canadian literary history or in Shields’s wider body of work will find it a distinctive entry in her bibliography.