Catharine Parr Strickland, the fifth child of Thomas and Elizabeth Strickland, spent her childhood and youth in the gentle countryside of the Norfolk and Suffolk border in England’s historic East Anglia region. Her early childhood passed at Stowe House, a large farm perched on the south side of the Waveney River valley near the town of Bungay, which the family leased from 1803 to 1808. Her later childhood and youth were spent at Reydon Hall, the seventeenth-century manor-house and farm near Southwold purchased by Thomas Strickland in the winter of 1808. Eighty years later in Canada, Catharine recorded her memories...

This section takes its parameters from two important events in Catharine Parr Traill’s long life. It begins following the death of her husband in the early summer of 1859 – an event nowhere described in the letters available to the editors – and concludes with the publication of her remarkable bookStudies of Plant Life in Canada; or, Gleanings from Forest, Lake and Plainin early January 1885. These letters are dominated by what Traill called her ‘real trials,’ her struggle on so many fronts to watch over and provide for her children, despite her very limited means and often...

The distinguishing feature of the last period of Traill’s life was that it included several honours and public recognition, even as she lived with the consequences of her aging. Some of that recognition was occasioned byStudies of Plant Life in Canada. Although its publication had been anticipated before the end of 1884, first copies did not appear until early January. The preparation of twenty lithographic plates by Agnes Chamberlin to illustrate the text slowed the production process (Letter 77); the book was assembled by A.S. Woodburn of Ottawa and distributed over a period of weeks. As her payment, Traill...