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Catharine Parr Traill has a greater importance in nineteenth-century Canadian letters than her work as a whole would seem to justify. Mistrusting fiction (which she felt satisfied the imagination while seducing the judgment) and feeling little aptitude for poetry, she was at her best in writing discursively about subjects she deemed to be useful to her readers. In particular, as in The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer (1836), she made the problems of the female settler in Canada and the description of Canadian flora and fauna her concerns. While these topics may seem today small cause for a literary reputation, they were subjects about which she knew a great deal and to which she brought a geniality, openness, and thoughtfulness that distinguish her observations. In England, had she remained, she would likely have become a minor contributor to what W. J. Keith has called "the rural tradition" in English prose.
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