Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie are icons of the Canadian imagination. Yet most of what we know of these two English gentlewomen who spent their adult lives struggling in Britain’s harsh and vigorous colony comes from their own self-consciously crafted writings and from other writers’ sometimes fanciful depictions of them. But what were the women behind the authorial voices really like? In Sisters in the Wilderness, award-winning author Charlotte Gray breathes life into two remarkable and fascinating characters and brings us a vivid picture of life in the backwoods of Upper Canada.