Nellie Letitia McClung | Biography

Although her published work comprises sixteen volumes--including fiction, essays, and autobiography--Nellie Letitia McClung will be remembered chiefly for her contributions to the cause of feminism and women's suffrage. However, her literary efforts, too, still hold some intrinsic value, both artistically and historically.

McClung was born Nellie Letitia Mooney in Chatsworth, Ontario, on 20 October 1873 to John and Letitia McCurdy Mooney. In 1880 her family moved west to homestead land in Manitoba. Her childhood in this rural, pioneering community shaped both her imagination and her character. After graduating from normal school in 1889 McClung taught in rural and semirural schools until 1896, when she married Robert Wesley McClung, a pharmacist, and settled in Manitou, Manitoba. They had five children. Here she wrote her first novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), which grew out of a short story composed for a magazine contest. The narrative, with its emphasis on the everyday life of a farming community, is well characterized by Desmond Pacey's term "regional idyll." As Pacey says, in this romantic version of rural life, "Trials and hardships are not completely ignored, but they are overcome or circumvented," and "Such qualities as thrift, industry, and integrity will always, in the long run, triumph." McClung's essential themes--temperance, liberal Protestantism, and feminism--are all set forth in her first novel.

In 1911, the year after the publication of The Second Chance, in which Pearlie Watson of Sowing Seeds in Danny is once again the heroine, the McClungs moved to Winnipeg. Here she helped to organize the Political Equality League and played a prominent role in the struggle for women's freedom and suffrage. In Women's Parliament, a burlesque of the government, which was performed at Winnipeg's Walker Theatre on 28 January 1914, McClung played the premier. In the second volume of her autobiography, The Stream Runs Fast (1945), she writes of this episode, "We had one desire: to make the attitude of the government ridiculous and set the whole province laughing at the old concept of chivalry, when it takes the form of hat lifting, giving up seats in street cars, opening doors and picking up handkerchiefs, pretending that this can ever be a substitute for common, old-fashioned justice!" The struggle for the vote also provided the background for the third Pearlie Watson novel, Purple Springs (1921).

In 1914 the McClungs moved to Alberta, and in 1921 McClung was elected to the provincial assembly. Defeated in 1926, partly because of her uncompromising temperance views, she was active in the so-called "Persons Case," which culminated in a decision by the Privy Council in London that Canadian women were indeed "persons" under the British North America Act. This conclusion, she writes in The Stream Runs Fast, "came as a surprise to many women in Canada ... who had not known that they were not persons until they heard it stated that they were."

After the publication of the first volume of her autobiography, Clearing in the West, in 1935 the McClungs moved to Victoria, British Columbia. In 1936 McClung was appointed the first woman member of the board of governors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and in 1938 she served as a Canadian delegate to the League of Nations. However, in 1943 illness forced her retirement from public life.

McClung's fiction is seldom more than what Northrop Frye calls "an incidental commentary on a non-literary career." Her characters are stereotypes, her work loosely structured, sentimental, and consciously designed for moral uplift. But her work remains readable for its shrewd observation of human absurdity and its detailed description of the rural countryside and people; and although she never achieves the comic inventiveness or the moral depth of the writers she most admires--George Eliot, Victor Hugo, and, especially, Charles Dickens--in her life if not in her art she was, as she claimed in Clearing in the West, "a voice for the voiceless ... a defender of the weak," and there is much in the staunch feminism and hardy idealism of "Calamity Nell" that is still of value today.