For sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, marriage and emigration were two sides of the same coin. Emigration was Moodie's ‘husband's call’. When she cried for her life in England, she consoled herself with the fact that ‘my children round me play, / My husband's smiles approve’ (75). Parr Traill asks herself rhetorically, ‘[H]ave I not a right to be cheerful and contented for the sake of my beloved partner? […] if for his sake I have voluntarily left home, and friends, and country, shall I therefore sadden him by useless regrets?’ Confirming the news of her marriage to her friends, James and Emma Bird, she writes that ‘the waves of the Atlantic will soon roll between’ them, but despite this, she is still ‘willing to lose all for the sake of one dear valued friend and husband to share with him all the changes and chances of a settlers [sic] life’. Before the sisters met their respective husbands, they had both resigned themselves to spinsterhood, hoping to use their literary ambitions to secure themselves financially. Their childhood had been filled with literary endeavours. Later, Parr Traill would liken themselves to the other, more famous, literary sisterhood of the Brontës: ‘[W]ere I to write a history of the childhood of the Strickland family,’ she muses in her journal, ‘how many things there would be that would remind the reader of the early days of the Brontës.’ As they grew older, these endeavours began to take on a professional form, as they sought out publishing opportunities in London. In between the years 1818, when her father died, to 1832, when she left for Canada, Parr Traill published at least a dozen books and made many more contributions to periodicals. By 1830, Moodie too had ‘published several books of entertainment and moral instruction’, and ‘contributed numerous stories and poems to […] popular annuals and gift books’. Additionally, she had begun to gain recognition as ‘a writer of promise in literary circles such as those in which [the abolitionist] Thomas Pringle moved’. It was in London, in Pringle's house, that Moodie first met her future husband, John Dunbar Moodie, and then through John, that Parr Traill met hers, Thomas Traill.