SOURCE: Glickman, Susan. “The Waxing and Waning of Susanna Moodie's ‘Enthusiasm.’” Canadian Literature 130 (autumn 1991): 7-26.

In the following essay, Glickman discusses Moodie's early religious and literary influences evident in her poetry collection Enthusiasm.

“At my Heart's Core” by Robertson Davies is a Shavian discussion play starring the three Otonabee pioneers who are best known to posterity through their writings: Frances Stewart, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie. The play is set at the time of the Upper Canada Rebellion and Susanna Moodie, whom the stage directions describe as having “a ladylike hint of the drill-sergeant in her demeanour,” persistently blames the Methodists for stirring up revolution.¹ “When you say Methodist, you say Radical. They all think that the world can be improved by rebellion against authority. It can't,” she declares. At the same time, she refuses to make the usual nineteenth-century association between revolution and poetry, for when...