Stories Subversive: Through the Field with Gloves Off

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Although she is remembered today as a social reformer who campaigned for
women’s rights to vote, it was as an author that Nellie McClung first
came to national attention in the opening decades of this century. Her
first novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), was a bestseller in Canada,
as was its sequel, The Second Chance (1910). McClung’s novels and
short fiction have been largely dismissed by literary critics as
“sentimental, melodramatic, and romanticized rural idylls.” Editor
Marilyn Davis rejects this criticism, arguing instead that the prairie
author’s work represents the “subversive writing” of a woman who
dedicated her life to exposing the hardships and injustices suffered by
many in Canadian society.

This collection of McClung’s stories, many of which first appeared in
such prominent publications as Maclean’s and Saturday Night, reflects
McClung’s trademark optimism. The happy endings so despised by the
critics are indicative of the author’s refusal to give in to despair.
But neither does she shrink from such difficult subjects as alcoholism,
wife and child abuse, single motherhood, illegitimacy, racial prejudice,
and the fight for legalized birth control. McClung, who wed humor,
irony, and satire to bring to public attention the plight of the
marginalized, once observed that too many people chose to “walk
through the field with gloves on.” In her fiction, as in her life,
Nellie McClung took the gloves off.