Roughing it in the Bush by Susanna Moodie

Susanna Moodie was born Susanna Strickland in the Suffolk town of Bungay in the year 1803. She grew up in a middle-class environment where reading and writing were encouraged. She is the sixth and final daughter of a retired port manager. Her sisters Agnes and Elizabeth would go on to publish Lives of the Queens of England and other aristocratic histories, while her sister Catharine Parr (later Traill) would travel to Canada and write several natural history works, and her brother Samuel, another emigrant to Canada, would write on the life of the settler. Susanna's juvenilia includes poetry and a number of young adult literature stories. Susanna Strickland married John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, a military officer who had returned to England from South Africa to look for a wife and pursue publishing enterprises.

They moved to Upper Canada (Ontario) a year later. Susanna Moodie's Flora Lyndsay (1854) is a fictitious depiction of the family's journey to Canada, culminating in the journey up the Saint Lawrence River. The Moodies lived on cleared property near Port Hope for their first seventeen months in Canada. They moved to a bush property in Douro Township, north of Peterborough, near Samuel Strickland and Catharine Parr Traill's residences, in 1834.

For five years, the Moodies lived on the farm, and their memoir, Roughing It in the Bush (1852), chronicles their experiences in these two backwoods locales. Dunbar Moodie served in the Upper Canada militia from 1837 to 1839 before being named Sheriff of Victoria District (later Hastings County) in 1839. Around 1840, he and his family relocated to Belleville, where they remained until his death in 1869. Susanna Moodie spent her time after her husband's death with her various grown children and her sister Catharine.

Susanna Moodie died in 1885 in Toronto, Ontario.