Abstract
This chapter offers a discussion of how the Colonial Gothic recurs in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and her short story “The Well in the Wilderness” (1847). An unwilling émigré to Canada, Moodie portrays frontier settlements as unsafe spaces, full of danger and disease. Throughout her memoir and short story, families are threatened by wild animals and an unforgiving landscape. The chapter also discusses Moodie’s involvement with the Spiritualist movement, and how the supernatural surfaces in her earlier novels and short fiction set in England. Ultimately, Moodie’s contribution to the Colonial Gothic combines both a European and Canadian Gothic tradition.
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Edmundson, M. (2018). Susanna Moodie, Colonial Exiles, and the Frontier Canadian Gothic. In: Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76917-2_2
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