Six daughters, six writers
Part 2 of a look at Reydon Hall, the U.K. childhood home of famed writers
Once the Strickland family had moved into Reydon Hall on a cold December’s night in 1808, Thomas’s project of educating his six daughters as able writers moved into full swing.
Catharine Parr was seven and Susanna five at that time. The oldest were Eliza at fourteen and Agnes at twelve. By then the family was complete. Two boys had arrived--Samuel born in 1805 and Thomas in 1807. But it was the girls in their energy, creativeness, and communal playfulness who dominated the family circle from 1808 onwards. Eliza, who was of a prickly disposition, and Agnes often played the role of disciplinarians of their younger sisters when the parents were absent. There was certainly some discontent with that arrangement among the younger girls.
Una Pope-Hennessey described Thomas as “a cultivated man with a taste for pedagogy.” His library, bolstered by books from Sir Issac Newton’s library (by way of his wife’s family), was a treasuretrove for the daughters who loved to share historical readings and act out plays. To be the youngest among them was to hold a special place. Catharine and Susanna were at times pampered and at times disciplined, but they were quick to learn the elements of style, different modes of writing, and their own ways of seeing historical figures and events. Susanna was the most excitable and rebellious of the sisterhood, choosing to make heroes of figures like William Wallace, Arminius and Napoleon. As Pope-Hennessey noted “History hung like a vapour over the Suffolk scene and from the mists activated by the Strickland imagination rose wraiths from the past.”
All this was prelude to the writing projects that soon began to bubble up, spurred on by the mysteries of the Reydon attic and local lore. Surprisingly the first to have a book published was Catharine Parr. In 1818 she accidently left one of her manuscripts in plain sight. A visitor from London picked it up, looked it over, and took it to a publishing friend in the city. To much familial excitement, Disobedience; or, Mind What Mamma Says (1818) appeared in print a few months later. All the while, however, the precocious Agnes was seeing her poems appear in local newspapers, though she had not yet had a book published.
In short, the sisterly competition was on. Through the 1820s five of the sisters were published. While Eliza headed for London and found work as an editor of The Court Journal, her four younger sisters (Sarah was the lone holdout) published books aimed at adolescent readers while they all sent poems and stories to the editors of the newly-popular London Annuals like Ackermann’s Forget-Me-Not and Thomas Pringle’s Friendship’s Offering.
I won’t list all the books here, but Catharine and Susanna published more than seven each before they emigrated in 1832. Susanna’s first, Spartacus: A Roman Story, appeared in 1822. Following Agnes’s noteworthy success as a published poet (two of her collections appeared in the 1820s), Susanna began to aim for an adult audience with a collection entitled Enthusiasm, and Other Poems (1831). A year earlier she and Agnes had combined their skills to produce a thin volume of poems set to music called Patriotic Songs. For her part Catharine surprised her sisters by writing an epistolary story about immigrating to Canada. It was called The Young Emigrants (1826) and appeared a year after her brother Sam set out to make a life for himself in for Upper Canada.
In the 1830s and 1840s Reydon Hall continued to be the site of book production. Jane Margaret produced further historical and religious works aimed at the adolescent market. The big story, however, was The Lives of the Queens of England (1840-48) which brought Agnes’s name before many British readers. In fact, the volumes were a joint production of Eliza and Agnes; the latter received credit for the entire multi-volume work while Eliza, who did much of the research and some of the writing, insisted on withholding her name.
This sisterly partnership continued through several other multivolume projects including Lives of the Queens of Scotland (1850-59) and single volumes including ‘the Bachelor Kings of England’ (1861) and ‘the Last Four Princesses of the House of Stuart’ (1870). Most of these were written and edited at Reydon Hall. In 1864, however, the manor house had to be sold after the death of their mother.
Agnes continued to enjoy extraordinary fame as a royalist historian with a keen interest in female sovereigns. She travelled widely and was invited to the homes and libraries of numerous leading aristocratic families. She became a legend in her own time both as an historian and as a literary figure well known for her poems and stories.
Meanwhile Catharine Parr (now Traill) and Susanna (now Moodie) followed their brother Sam to Upper Canada in 1832 and found themselves roughing it in the bush. Catharine was the first to test her wings in writing about the remote and mostly unsettled colony. Her first Canadian book, The Backwoods of Canada, appeared in 1836. Agnes helped her find a London publisher. While both she and Susanna sought out as many publishing outlets as they could in England and Canada, it was not until the 1850s that both were able to return to making books.
1852 proved a banner year for them. While Catharine published Canadian Crusoes (again with Agnes’s help and editing), Susanna composed a darker and more personalized response to Catharine’s optimistic Backwoods. Her twovolume Roughing It in the Bush proved a best-seller for her English publisher Richard Bentley. He immediately urged her to write a sequel. She entitled it Life in the Clearings (1853).
Little, however, did Susanna realize what a tempest she had let loose at Reydon Hall. Basking in her celebrity status in Britain, Agnes was outraged by her sister’s vulgar book. It was full of ragtag, riffraff characters, crude language, low-life encounters, and it was written in an undignified personal style. Moreover, Susanna had the effrontery to dedicate the book to her. Though she had kept up a lively correspondence with Susanna and John Moodie till that point, she never wrote to them again. Further she insisted that her mother and sisters support her in her silence.
When a widowed Sam Strickland came home in 1853, Agnes, Eliza and Jane insisted that he write his own memoir; they oversaw and carefully edited it. Agnes made sure that Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (1853) was published by Richard Bentley (Susanna’s own London publisher), and she did all she could to see that Roughing It in the Bush was discredited and displaced in readers’ eyes by Sam’s book.
Again Reydon Hall was the site of the action. What had been an off-and-on-again relationship between Agnes and Susanna ended thus abruptly. Though she must have been deeply hurt by Agnes’s queenly and inflexible response, Susanna in later years said very little publically about the rupture. For her part Agnes extended the sting by leaving Susanna out of her will in 1874, though she did designate a bequest to Susanna’s daughter, Agnes Fitzgibbon Chamberlin, who was her namesake.
Such were the final results of Thomas Strickland’s extraordinary educational project. He had not anticipated such difficult matters as writerly egos and deep-seated snobbery among his daughters. Reach Michael Peterman, professor emeritus of English literature at Trent University, at mpeterman@trentu.ca.