The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie

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.