Elizabeth Helen Thompson (1952- ) has published her Ph.D. thesis as "The Pioneer Woman: A Canadian Character Type" (1987). She has also edited "The Emigrant's Guide To North America," by Robert MacDougall, and "Roughing It In The Bush," by Susanna Moodie.

Susanna Moodie´s Roughing It in the Bush has inspired controversy since its first publication in 1852. Readers tend to react strongly to the book and its author, and critics continue to debate its merits and idiosyncrasies with respect to form, genre, them and motifs, as well as characterization - with special emphasis on Moodie´s depiction of herself. Although ostensibly a book about one middle-class English woman´s experiences in pioneer Upper Canada during the 1830´s, Roughing It has been variously labelled history, fiction, autobiography, travel literature. What cannot be debated, however, is that this is Susanna Moodie´s one great work; her novels are cliché-ridden, romantic fiction, and the only other Canadian non-fiction, Life in the Clearings, set as it is at a later stage of settlement, lacks the emotional intensity generated by the account of an emigrant´s first exposure to Canada and documented so graphically in Roughing It in the Bush. This new edition of Roughing It in the Bush provides a reliable primary text, a new biography, documents that help contextualize various aspects of the book, and a selection of critical commentary from the following: Margaret Atwood, Charles Frederick Briggs, Carl Ballstadt, D.M.R. Bentley, Marian Fowler, Blanche Hume, Carl Klinck, Thomas Guthrie Marquis, Michael Peterman, Carol Shields, David Stouck.