Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Susanna Moodie: Voice And Vision | 1977 | Carol Shields | Buy |
Carol Shields wrote Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision as her doctoral thesis at the University of Ottawa, published in book form in 1977. Susanna Moodie was a 19th-century British writer who came to Canada in 1832 and documented the harsh conditions of settler life in works such as Roughing It in the Bush (1852). Shields’s study examines Moodie’s prose, poetry, and correspondence, tracing her development as a writer and the ways in which her work contributed to an emerging Canadian literary tradition.
The interest Shields developed in writing this study stayed with her throughout her career. You can see Moodie’s influence on Shields’s later fiction in the way her novels handle documentary evidence (letters, photographs, records) as a way of constructing and interrogating a life. The 2016 graphic novel Susanna Moodie: Roughing It in the Bush, based on Shields’s work, shows how her engagement with this particular writer spanned nearly four decades.