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.

Originally published in 1836, this was one of the few books on frontier Canada to give details of the domestic economy of a settler's life. Her target audience was the upper-class English immigrant. "It is not only the poor husbandmen and artisans, that move in vast bodies to the west, but it is the enterprising English capitalist, and the once affluent landholder, alarmed at the difficulties of establishing numerous families in independence, in a country where every profession is overstocked, that join the bands that Great Britain is pouring forth into these colonies! Of what vital...

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.