The Journals of Susanna Moodie

First US edition. Small 4to. Pp. xxiii, [72]. Quarter-bound dark blue cloth over speckled cream pictorial paper boards embossed in copper gilt and black; navy-blue coated end papers. No dust jacket, as issued. In illustrated card slipcase. B/w & col. illustrations by Charles Pachter. With a foreword by David Staines and a memoir by the illustrator. First trade edition with Pachter's illustrations.

Signed by Author to title page. A beautiful copy of this visually stunning book.

The hand-set, hand-printed livre d'artiste edition was published in 1980 and comprised 37 sheets that required 115 separate colour runs for an issue of 120, plus two printers' proofs, resulting in 14,030 hand-pulled serigraphic impressions. Originally published in 1970 as a paperback original by Oxford University Press, Toronto, featuring collages by the author herself.

Atwood's third poetry collection. A poem cycle reflecting on an English gentlewoman's confrontation with the Canadian wilderness, her resultant feelings of dislocation and alienation, and her meditations on nature and civilization. Atwood composed her most fully realized volume of poetry, after reading two 1850s memoirs by Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie, notably Roughing It in the Bush, which further inspired her 1996 novel Alias Grace. The book encompasses three separate journals, covering Moodie's 1832 arrival to a post-death narration ending in 1969.