Though her life was largely circumscribed by domesticity and poverty both in England and in Canada, Catharine Parr Traill's interests, experiences, and contacts were broad and various. Her contribution to our knowledge of nineteenth-century Canadian life, from a literary, historical, and scientific perspective, was significant. Chosen from her nearly 500 extant letters, the 136 presented here vividly reflect typical aspects of social and family life, attachments to the Old World, health and medical conditions, travel, religious faith and practice, the stresses of settlement in Upper Canada in the 1830s, and the dispersal of families with the opening up of the Canadian and American West. Spanning seventy years, the letters are presented in three sections, each prefaced by an introductory essay. The first, '1830-1859: "The changes and chances of a settler's life,"' traces Traill's story from her emergence as one of the literary Strickland sisters in England, through the difficult, poverty-stricken years of settlement and family raising in Canada, to her husband's death. The second, '1860-1884: "The poor country mouse,"' reveals her quiet life at Westove (her cottage at Lakefield), her devotion to family and friends, and the time she spent writing botanical essays and seeking a publisher for them. A trip to Ottawa in 1884 awakened her to a recognition of the literary stature she had earned. The third section, '1885-1899: "The sight of green things is life to me,"' begins with the publication of her Studies of Plant Life in Canada and sheds light on the public recognition she received, her continuing literary productivity, and the strengthening of her role as matriarch of the Strickland family in Canada. It closes with her death on 29 August 1899. Together with the introductory essays, Traill's correspondence offers an intimate and revealing portrait of a courageous, caring, and remarkable woman-mother, pioneer, writer, and botanist.

This is a selection of letters written by William Traill to his mother, sisters, nieces, and nephew while he was in the service of the HBC. The letters are fascinating to read and extremely important in describing a way of life that we know relatively little about, as very few records to date describe career, courtship, marriage, household work, births, children, deaths, and generational change. This collection of letters is both interesting and poignant: read on any level they are truly engrossing. He found employment with the Hudson's Bay Company in what was to become the Canadian West. His letters home are a rich and detailed portrait of domestic life in the fur trade of the Northwest between 1864 and 1893. At turns gritty then deeply touching but always fascinating and informative, the Willie Traill letters throw open a window on the joys and heart-breaking challenges of family life in the service of the fur trade.

First published in 1985, this volume of letters follows Susanna Moodie from her Suffolk girlhood and her experience as an aspiring young writer in London, through her emigration to Upper Canada and five decades of Canadian life. The letters provide a sense of Moodie's literary accomplishments before her emigration, the long, uncertain struggle to develop her career as a writer in the colony, and the brief but intense period of literary activity during which her books were published in Britain and the U.S.