Joy Barratt

Unfolding a Lost World Joy Barratt

Unfolding A Lost World is a series of interpretations of letters written almost two hundred years ago by a trio of original Canadian settler women. Frances Stewart, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill began the settlement of the Peterborough area of Upper Canada, now the province of Ontario, with their husbands and children. The first of the three, Frances Stewart, arrived from Ireland in 1822. She was followed by the two Scottish sisters, Catharine and Susanna, a decade later. These women, uniquely among the immigrants of that time, wrote elaborate, numerous and illuminating letters back to their families in Ireland and Scotland. The poems presented here have been found in the words of those letters.