The Illustrated Journals of Susanna Moodie - Hardcover

Atwood, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1770862218 ISBN 13: 9781770862210

Publisher: Cormorant Books, 2014

Synopsis

The Journals of Susanna Moodie, arguably Margaret Atwood’s finest work of poetry, was first published by Oxford University Press in 1970. In it, she adopts the voice of Susanna Strickland Moodie, an English woman who came to live in the rural area near Peterborough, Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century, and who wrote about her experiences for English readers in her classic account of Canadian pioneer life, Roughing it in the Bush. Atwood’s poetry, based on the Moodie prose, covers Moodie’s arrival in Canada in 1832 and ends with a prophetic commentary by a dead Susanna Moodie on twentieth-century Canada.

Charles Pachter began illustrating the poems in 1968, when Atwood sent him a first manuscript. Of his first reading, he has written: “It was a fateful moment. I was so stunned by its beauty and power that I realized that every early Atwood folio I had done up until now (there were five) must be a rehearsal for this.” The thirty images were completed within a year, but the original folio was not produced until 1980, when 120 copies were hand-printed in a boxed edition, which is now in public and private collections around the world. In 1997, Macfarlane Walter & Ross published a small-format edition in hard covers.

About this title

Review:

The poetic/artistic exploration of what it means to find yourself thrown into a hostile environment, these poems by Margaret Atwood and silk-screen illustrations by Charles Pachter are based on the journals of Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie. The setting allows Atwood to write cutting lines about the fundamental tensions in creating and defining a self. One such tension, the assertion of will on the world as well as on one's self, set against the spirit-crushing tribulations of loneliness and hopelessness, is especially electric. The Journals of Susanna Moodie is a beautiful and hypnotic book.

From the Inside Flap:

The landmark collaboration of two pre-eminent Canadian artists in an attractive, affordable format.

As fledgling artists in their respective fields, Margaret Atwood and Charles Pachter were enthusiastic collaborators in a unique art form, the livre d'artiste ? the marriage of original graphic work with literary text. Beginning in the mid-sixties, while both were still students, they worked together on five limited-edition handmade books, volumes of Atwood?s poetry with Pachter?s interpretive artwork. The culmination of their collaboration, the work that is considered their masterpiece, is The Journals of Susanna Moodie. In her reading of Susanna Moodie?s chronicles of pioneer life in nineteenth-century Canada, Atwood found the haunting and timeless themes that still obsess us.

The poems of The Journals of Susanna Moodie were first published in 1970 in a standard format. This sequence of poems is regarded as a classic, in addition to being connected with her later novel, Alias Grace. In 1980, Pachter was able to add his own vibrant, evocative images and create the version they had dreamt of: a hand-set, hand-printed illustrated limited edition of 120 numbered copies.

This popular edition is a faithful re-creation of the original, accompanied by an introductory memoir by Pachter, describing his friendship with Atwood and the creative process behind this breathtaking work, and a foreword by David Staines, who pays homage to Atwood, Pachter, and Moodie and their central places in our art and literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cormorant Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1770862218
• ISBN 13: 9781770862210
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 120
• Illustrator: Pachter Charles