ABSTRACT
This chapter considers an important print form that enabled British emigrants to North America to imagine themselves within a national community: the Canadian settler memoir. It examines the means by which Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie forged a new British identity for themselves and fellow immigrants, comparing their memoirs to lesser-known accounts such as Charlotte Elizabeth's Personal Recollections and Mary Howitt's Our Cousins in Ohio. While these women's memoirs share a common goal of reproducing the British home on North American soil, the chapter argues that they achieve this reproduction differently: some by emphasizing the British character of the colonial home, others by contrasting British domesticity with 'foreign' homes and cultural values, still others by transforming the land itself into an affective bond between settler and nation. In Roughing It in the Bush, Moodie, like Anna Harrison, is obsessed with establishing a model British home on the North American frontier.
