Forest and other Gleanings reclaims for the contemporary reader a number of stories and sketches written by Catharine Parr Traill after her emigration to Canada in 1832. While most pieces collected here appeared in magazines in Britain, the United States, and Canada, a few have been drawn from archival holdings and make their first appearance here. This collection seeks, as it were, to complete her aspirations and to offer readers interested in Traill and 19th-century Upper Canada a "gleaning" of her better sketches and stories.

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...