I am going to argue that the nineteenth-century novel is anomalous using as an example an anomalous nineteenth-century novel. The anomalous novel, Catharine Parr Traill’s Canadian Crusoes (1852), is not well-known now, although it was well reviewed and popular in its time, and for about fifty years thereafter. A genre fiction in at least two ways—as a young adult novel and as an adventure fiction—it is also an emigration novel, which may or may not be a genre. It was written in Canada by a pioneer who is often described as “British-Canadian” and who began writing children’s books at the age of sixteen to support herself and her family after her father died. The field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, might best be described as that of “colonial letters.”  I mean “letters” in both the sense of belles lettres and in the sense of epistles written home. Anglophone Canadian fiction and travel writing of the nineteenth century was not usually read by Canadians, but rather by Britons in Britain, who might or might not be prospective Canadians. The writers in the field of colonial letters who imagined and constructed fictional settlements such as the ones proposed in Canadian Crusoes “participate in domination, but as dominated agents; they are neither dominant, plain and simple, nor are they dominated.” Parr Traill, as the wife of a British army officer, is mildly privileged in the colonial social hierarchy, but just by virtue of having to participate in emigration, she is among the dominated citizens of nineteenth-century Britain. Her participation in the representation of empire is accordingly complex: her writing encourages emigration to Canada’s forested “north” and also depicts the intense hardship and tragedy that so often attends it.