ABSTRACT
Susanna Moodie's (1803-65) iconic place in the cultural consciousness of English Canada rests on her settlement memoirs, Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853), in which she details the hardship and anxieties she experienced as an immigrant to Upper Canada in the 1830s. Carol Shields, surveying most of Moodie's fiction, including Flora Lyndsay, in Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision, finds that three themes predominate: 'the complex personality, sexual reversal and the social structure'. Class anxiety and class ambivalence are major, though hidden, themes in Flora Lyndsay, symptomatic of the authors own deeply divided feelings on these all-important subjects. Like the divided house where the story begins, many antithetical elements in 'Noah Cotton' are presented as doubles: Mrs Mason and Mrs Grimshawe, the bad and good widows; Sophy and Mary, the proud beauty and the humble hunchback; Noah Cotton and Bill Martin, the true and false murderers.
