In 1883 Anna Leveridge brought her children from England to make a home with her husband in the backwoods of north Hastings County, Ontario. She learned to live frugally, and to practise the rugged pioneer arts of making do, using up, doing without.

From the time of her arrival until 1891, when her mother died, Anna wrote frequently to her family in England. Some of her letters were lost, but many were kept and later returned to the family in Canada. They tell about her life, with its hardships, its joy in simple things, and its abiding faith in the goodness of God. Louis Tivy, Anna’s grandson, prepared the letters for publication. In writing the accompanying narrative, he drew upon the recollections of his grandparents and memories of his own childhood in rural Ontario.

LOUIS TIVY was born in 1902 on the farm where his grandparents, David and Anna Leveridge, lived. He taught school until he retired in 1965 and turned to writing. His articles on nature and pioneer days were published in the Family Herald and the Leamington Post and News. He died in 1972.

Louis Tivy's profile page

‘It is a joy to read a book of such simplicity and honesty. Anna Leveridge was a woman of warmth and great courage, but there are no heroics, no fights with bears, wolves or Indians in the backwoods of north Hastings Country. Most of the letters concern the 1880s, but in my respects life was harder and more primitive than in the western Ontario portrayed by Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, published in 1838.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘The Leveridges’ story is an idyllic example of the triumph of rugged individualism, of the durability of the humbler virtues, a paean to the simple life.’

Globe and Mail