The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie - Hardcover

Pachter, Charles; Atwood, Margaret Eleanor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1770862218 ISBN 13: 9781770862210

Publisher: Cormorant Books, 2014

Synopsis

The finest example of two great artists working together to explore the soul of their nation. The Journals of Susanna Moodie, arguably Margaret Atwood's finest work of poetry, was firstpublished by Oxford University Press in 1970. In it, she adopts the voice of Susanna StricklandMoodie, an English woman who came to live in the rural area near Peterborough, Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century, and who wrote about her experiences for Englishreaders in her classic account of Canadian pioneer life, Roughing it in the Bush. Atwood'spoetry, based on the Moodie prose, covers Moodie's arrival in Canada in 1832 and ends witha prophetic commentary by a dead Susanna Moodie on twentieth-century Canada. Charles Pachter began illustrating the poems in 1968, when Atwood sent him a firstmanuscript. Of his first reading, he has written: "It was a fateful moment. I was so stunned byits beauty and power that I realized that every early Atwood folio I had done up until now(there were five) must be a rehearsal for this." The thirty images were completed within a year, but the original folio was not produceduntil 1980, when 120 copies were hand-printed in a boxed edition, which is now in public andprivate collections around the world. In 1997, MacfarlaneWalter & Ross published a smallformatedition in hard covers.

About this title

Review:

In 1832, a 29-year-old Englishwoman departed for Canada with her family. The product of a genteel upbringing, Susanna Moodie had already established somewhat of a reputation as a writer of essays, poetry and children's stories. None of this, however, prepared her for the rigours of pioneer life, which she chronicled in two volumes of autobiography and eventually came to cherish. Moodie died in 1885, and-- almost a century later--Margaret Atwood seized upon this quintessential pioneer as the subject for a verse epic. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Atwood uses Moodie's own words as raw material, reshaping and cutting them into a startling meditation on nature, alienation and our sense of place:

We left 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.

Atwood's epic was first published in 1970 and reappeared in a 1980 limited edition featuring illustrations by Charles Pachter, and it is this version that Houghton Mifflin had the good sense to reprint. The result is an elegant artefact, a fitting tribute to an emblematic figure--a woman who Carol Shields has described as "a Crusoe baffled by her own heated imagination, the dislocated immigrant who never fully accepts or rejects her adopted country."

About the Author:

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 30 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. In addition to the classic The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include Cat's Eye, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize. Oryx and Crake was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. Her other books for children include Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda and Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cormorant Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1770862218
• ISBN 13: 9781770862210
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 103