In Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, the admonishing spirit of Catharine Parr Traill urges Morag to get busy as Traill did, planting an orchard, discovering and naming wildflowers, writing books with, as Traill puts it, “some modest degree of success, while at the same time cultivating my plot of land and rearing my dear children, of whom I bore nine.” Half-humorously, Laurence invokes this great Canadian pioneer and writer as an inspiration for what a woman can manage to accomplish – though the example is much easier to admire than to follow.

Both these new biographies of Traill succeed in giving children a sense of her remarkable qualities – her resourcefulness, courage, and perseverance through tribulations that might have killed off 10 lesser mortals. Her place in Canadian history comes, however, not just from her steadfast endurance, a trait of many pioneers, but from her lifelong fascination with the natural world and her ability to write of that fascination in many popular books. The dramatic contrast between Traill’s early life, as a cherished younger daughter in an upper-middle-class English family living on a country estate, and her later life of labour and privation on various Ontario homesteads, is vividly portrayed by Westerhout and Martin, both established Ontario writers.

A more difficult aspect of the subject, however, is conveying the Traills’ decades of frustrated effort, as one farm after another failed to prosper and had to be sold, and one child and grandchild after another sickened and died. While Westerhout emphasizes Traill’s faith and resilience, the latter part of her chronological text gets bogged down in details of family troubles. Martin spends less time on the tribulations of the Traills’ life as homesteaders, and by separating her material into thematic chapters, ending with one on Traill as a naturalist, she avoids the repetition of gloomy outcomes.

Although Martin’s book is aimed at older readers than Westerhout’s, and has fewer illustrations, it reads more like a story, with the occasional dramatized scene, and factual background information blended into the compelling narrative. Many of the scenes described by the two biographers are, not surprisingly, the same. In one, the young sisters Catharine and Susanna (later Moodie) long to write stories and, in their mother’s absence, take paper from a family chest and indulge in the forbidden joy of writing fiction – until a smooth white hand reaches over Catharine’s shoulder and confiscates the pages. Mother has returned, and allows Catharine to keep the pages only if she promises to tear them up for paper to curl her hair with! Such incidents are recounted well by both biographers, but Martin is more successful at drawing her subject’s whole life together and making all the details count.

Both writers use maps, period illustrations, and explanatory sidebars. While this material is generously supplied in Making It Home, with sidebars on every page of text, its very abundance tends to distract from the central story. This is notably a problem when the supporting material gives historical details and capsule summaries of complicated events and issues which, though interesting in themselves, take the young reader far from Traill’s own life. In noting that the fireweed that plagued the Traill homestead is not the same plant as the Yukon’s provincial flower, was a picture of the 18th-century botanist Linnaeus really necessary? Nonetheless, all this background material does help, with the original drawings by Milkau, to give the book a lively look, almost like a little fact book of early Canadiana.

Although Martin’s chapters are somewhat longer, her appealing narrative style and clear focus throughout make the book easy to read, and her glossary, index, and suggestions for further reading are admirably reader-friendly. Photos and period illustrations are plentiful and effectively used. Both books quote freely from Traill’s own writing, where she richly reveals the warm-hearted character and interest in the world around her that sustained her through 97 years of a remarkable life.