Susanna Moodie's (1803–65) iconic place in the cultural consciousness of English Canada rests on her settlement memoirs, Roughing It in the Bush (1852) and Life in the Clearings (1853), in which she details the hardship and anxieties she experienced as an immigrant to Upper Canada (now Ontario) in the 1830s. Moodie's double vision is an accepted tenet of Canadian literature. The tableau of the genteel Englishwoman confronting the wilderness has acquired iconic status; the notions which gather around this seminal image have formed the sub-structure of a great deal of modern thought about Canadian national identity. The basic oppositions which are inherent in what has become the standard reading of Roughing It in the Bush – culture/nature, civilization/wilderness, structured/unstructured – have proved themselves to be highly serviceable constructs, ideally suited for probing the country's sense of itself as that sense is expressed in its literature, its art and even its politics.