Clearing In The West My Own Story

"Clearing the West" is the first of McClung's two autobiographical works. In it, she examines her life from birth to age twenty-three, recounting the events and influences that shaped her political and personal future, including her first years in school--both as a student and later a teacher--her early passion for writing, and her burgeoning interest in social reform. It was this interest that led to McClung's first political involvement with the Women's Christian Temperance Movement, the organization that spearheaded the women's right to vote effort in Canada.

The 70th anniversary edition of Nellie McClung's classic autobiography of growing up on the Canadian prairie.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Clearing in the West. My Own Story" by Nellie Letitia McClung. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Although her name today is synonymous with the women’s suffrage movement in Canada, Nellie McClung’s long and varied career covered several fields—from social activist to elected politician, from novelist to journalist. McClung was instrumental in Canadian women gaining the right to vote before their British and American counterparts—2016 marks the one-hundred-year anniversary of women’s suffrage in Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan—and in women being recognized as persons eligible to sit in the Senate. McClung was a household name by the time she was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta in 1921, a post she held for five years. When she settled on Vancouver Island in 1932, McClung was a highly esteemed public figure who had not only changed Canada’s political landscape and influenced women’s rights worldwide but had also raised five children and written a dozen best-selling books. From her beloved Island home, Lantern Lane, McClung continued to speak out against social injustice and inequality. In the late 1930s, she began to write a syndicated weekly newspaper column that served as social commentary for the years leading up to World War II. The Valiant Nellie McClung highlights a selection of those columns—covering themes as grave as war, as fundamental as the strength of the family unit, and as whimsical as the pleasure of gardening—and offers a unique reflection of our country’s history and an uncanny resonance today.

At the heart of fame is the tricky business of image management. Over the last 115 years, the celebrity autobiography has emerged as a popular and useful tool for that project. In Limelight, Katja Lee examines the memoirs of famous Canadian women like L. M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung, the Dionne Quintuplets, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain to trace the rise of celebrity autobiography in Canada and the role gender has played in the rise to fame and in writing about that experience. Arguing that the celebrity autobiography is always negotiating historically specific conditions, Lee charts a history of celebrity in English Canada and the conditions that shape the way women access and experience fame. These contexts shed light on the stories women tell about their lives and the public images they cultivate in their autobiographies. As strategies of self-representation change and the pressure to represent the private life escalates, the celebrity autobiography undergoes distinct shifts—in form, function, and content—during the period examined in this study. Limelight: Canadian Women and the Rise of Celebrity Autobiography is the first book to explore the history and development of the celebrity autobiography and offers compelling evidence of the critical role of gender and nation in the way fame is experienced and represented.

Nellie McClung was an extremely controversial figure in the first half of the 20th century: cartoonists viciously lampooned her and Conservatives burned her in effigy. But women across the country loved her. A spirited, witty and compassionate crusader, McClung was a best-selling author, a member of Parliament and a fervent advocate of women's rights. She was also the happily married mother of five, and a woman who loved a fancy hat. In telling this story, Candace Savage has drawn a vivid portrait of Nellie McLung and the times in which she lived. Incorporating McClung's own published writings--her autobiography, novels, short stories and articles--and informed by interviews with many who knew her, Our Nell is an immediate and intimate portrait of a remarkable Canadian woman.