Susanna Moodie has long been acknowledged as a key figure in pre-Confederation Canadian literature but most of her work has been overlooked or ignored by scholars and readers. The Work of Words not only provides the first comprehensive examination of the whole of Moodie's writing but also revolutionizes Moodie scholarship by overturning the myths that have cast her as pioneer heroine, one-woman garrison, or paranoid schizophrenic.

John Thurston considers the whole of Moodie's literary output, including her poems, short fiction, novels, and non-fiction, beginning with her youthful writing in England and culminating in an extensive analysis of her best-known work, Roughing It in the Bush. He establishes the biographical foundations of her writing, using recently discovered correspondence, and describes the historical issues and events that shaped her life and writing.

Through current historicist and feminist literary criticism, Thurston achieves new insights into Moodie's writing. Locating tensions of class, gender, and race within her work, he places Moodie in both the established tradition of nineteenth-century British women writers and the less-familiar tradition of North American class conflict.