Catharine Parr Strickland Traill (1802-1899) emigrated from Great Britain to Upper Canada in 1832 with her husband Thomas Traill, a retired officer. The Blackwoods of Canada (1836), Catharine's epistolary narrative based on her experiences in the country north of Peterborough in the years immediately following her arrival in North America, is an important record of nineteenth-century pioneering and a rich personal memoir of a woman. It has become a foundation work of Canadian literature.

Flora Lyndsay is Susanna Moodie's prequel to Roughing it in the Bush and Life in the Clearings. Though Moodie fictionalizes herself in the context of this novel, Flora Lyndsay remains a close personalized record of her family's experiences in planning their emigration and crossing the Atlantic.

Despite the limited critical attention it receives, Flora Lyndsay reveals Moodie's style, her sense of form, and her distinctive approach to writing female autobiography. This edition, complete with a wide corpus of endnotes, an extensive list of...