At Borealia, there's a fascinating history of the various editions of Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in The Bush by Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, with a lot of attention to the politics of it all.
In the first edition of her book in the 1850s, Moodie, good expat upper-class Brit that she was, celebrated the British Empire, denounced nasty local radicals like William Lyon Mackenzie, and regretted the "yankification" she saw in her backwoods neighbours. But soon the most common edition of her book in North America was an American one "edited" by Charles Frederick Briggs:
Without Moodie’s permission or knowledge, Briggs excised many of the epigraphs and most of the pro-British patriotic poems. Gone are also all textual expressions of loyalty to the British Crown, as well as the words ‘ultra-republican,’ ‘republican,’ and ‘democratic,’ which Moodie customarily used as pejorative terms whenever describing the egalitarian social mores of the colonies. John Moodie’s chapter on Canada and the U.S. was also expurgated, and the result was marketed as a sort of frontier adventure, an exotic ‘far-west’ romance of life in the Canadian backwoods.
Meanwhile, Moodie came to understand that her Canadian readers were not best pleased with the views in her original British edition. When she published a new edition in Canada in 1871, she too changed the emphasis:
Still smarting from the negative colonial reception of the first edition of Roughing It two decades earlier, the author purposely removed “many objectionable passages” that might still “arouse [the] anger” of her Canadian readers, and drafted a new introduction that praised Canada’s economic, political, and social progress in its journey from colony to Dominion. Overall, the textual changes toned down the book’s old pro-imperial tone, and shifted the focus on Canada’s potential as a young country, away from the immigrant nostalgia which dominated the first edition. The pro-British epigraphs were eliminated, as were the sections commenting directly (and negatively) on colonial social mores and the Americanization of Canadian society, including all the rebellion poems. In fact, in a radical volte-face, the new introduction rehabilitated Mackenzie, converting him from republican “felon leader” (in the British edition) into proto-national hero, the driving force behind Canada’s move towards colonial reform and the healthier state of affairs in the colony after Confederation.
I remember William Westfall, the literary scholar, once saying he might have found Susanna Moodie a bit much in person, but he thought he would have rolled along just fine with her sister Catherine Parr Traill. Still, smart author, Susanna evidently knew her audiences, or else she was capable of revising her views without being embarassed into silence.
