Popular Fiction May Agnes Fleming [1840-1880]

1. Popular FictionMay Agnes Fleming[1840-1880] born November 15, 1840 in New Brunswick, Canada. She began her writing career early, around the age of seventeen, and contributed stories to the New York Mercury and the Boson Pilot under her pen names Miss M. A. Earlie and Cousin May Carleton. After her marriage to John W. Fleming in 1865, Fleming continued her writing career, dropping her pen name and writing under her new married name, May Agnes Fleming.

2. She was "one of the first Canadians to pursue a highly successful career as a writer of popular fiction.“ • She moved to New York two years after her first novel, Erminie; or The gypsy's vow: a tale of love and vengeance was published there (1863). • Most of Fleming's novels were first published in serial form in popular story papers of the day. The earliest story appeared in 1857.

3. May Agnes Fleming was a master of the minor convention in which she wrote: the suspense-laden serial tale of high life in England and America. Her characters and incidents were simple and stereotyped, but her plots were as ingenious and satisfying as those of Wilkie Collins, and her writing style was vigorous and direct. • Although her fiction was primarily designed for a British and American audience, Mrs Fleming remembered her Canadian readers and took pains to introduce Canadian episodes and characters into most of her novels, at times with considerable ingenuity

4. Guy Earlscourt's Wife (1873) • A Terrible Secret, 1873 • A Wonderful Woman, A Mad Marriage, 1875 • Kate Danton, 1876 • One Night’s Mystery, 1879 • The Heir of Charlton, 1878

5. Because of their popularity, her novels were freqluently reprinted, many under two or more different titles. At times they were pirated by British and Canadian publishers and again given different titles. Fleming complained about the pirating of her works by Canadian publishers, a

6. CharlesGordonorRalph Connor (1860 –1937) • (September 13, 1860 – October 31, 1937) • Gordon was born in Glengarry County, Ontario, the son of Rev. Daniel Gordon • With a brother and two Knox College classmates he travelled to Scotland and Europe and spent a term of study in Edinburgh. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1890. • He moved to Alberta, then still part of the Northwest Territories, and he served a large area west of Calgary. He served in the Rocky Mountains until 1894. The congregation in Canmore is called Ralph Connor Memorial United Church in remembrance of his time there.

7. He moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba where he would spend nearly 40 years as minister of St. Stephen's Presbyterian/United Church, which was a new congregation when he arrived. During these 40 years he also wrote in Kenora, Ontario on Lake of the Woods.

8. Gordon became interested in writing during his student days at the University of Toronto. He published his first novel, Black Rock, in 1898. While the book was moderately successful in Canada, his second novel, The Sky Pilot,gained him international attention in 1899 and sold more than 1,000,000 copies. The Sky Pilot, like many of his works, was a frontier adventurestory with strong themes of morality and justice. He continued to write until his death in 1937. • His autobiography, Postscript to Adventure was penned in his final year and published posthumously in 1938.

9. Other works • The Man from Glengarry • The Girl from Glengarry • Glengarry School Days • The Foreigner and A Tale of Saskatchewan (1909) were all best-sellers. • Of his twenty-six novels, Black Rock, (1897), The Sky Pilot and The Man from Glengarry sold over 5 million copies combined. • In 1976, Charles William Gordon, (Ralph Connor) was recognized as a Person of National Historic Significance by Heritage Canada. • His work is admired and studied today because it provides illustration of the middle-class of Anglophone Canada of the time.

10. Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874 - 1942)

11. Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874 - 1942) wasbornatClifton, PrinceEdward Island, Nov. 30, 1874. Shecame to liveatLeaskdale, Ontario, in 1911 afterherweddingwith Rev. EwenMacdonald HerthreechildrenwerebornatLeaskdale, and shewroteclose to a dozenbookswhileshewasliving in theLeaskdaleMansebeforetheMacdonaldfamilymoved to Norval, Ontario in 1926. Mauddied in Toronto April 24, 1942 and wasburied at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. Montgomery was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and the Literary and Artistic Institute of France, and declared a Person of National Historic Significance in Canada.

12. Montgomery once wrote in her journals, “I cannot remember a time when I was not writing, or when I did not mean to be an author. To write has always been my central purpose around which every effort and hope and ambition of my life has grouped itself.” She began writing poetry and keeping journals when she was nine, and started writing short stories in her mid-teens, publishing them first in local newspapers and then selling them with considerable success to magazines throughout North America.

13. Best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908 • L.M. Montgomery’s first published novel was a resounding success with many sequels to follow. She made Canada’s Prince Edward Island an international tourist destination and her novels and hundreds of short stories have contributed greatly to Canadian Literature. Now almost a century later her works remain in print and continue to inspire stage, television, and film adaptations.

14. Anne of Green Gables Series • Novels • Anne of GreenGables(1908) • Anne of Avonlea(1909) (sequel to Anne of GreenGables) • Anne of the Island(1915) (sequel to Anne of Avonlea) • Anne'sHouse of Dreams (1917) (sequel to Anne of WindyPoplars) • of Silver Bush) • Anne of WindyPoplars (1936) (sequel to Anne of the Island) The seriesmade the character of Anne Shirley a mythic icon of Canadian culture. 

15. Montgomery completed her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, in 1905. It was inspired by such children’s books as Little Women and Alice in Wonderland, and by a newspaper story Montgomery read about an English couple who had arranged to adopt a boy but were sent a girl. The manuscript was rejected by every publisher she sent it to, so she gave up and kept it in a hat box until 1907, when she tried again and secured a publishing deal with L.C. Page in Boston.

16. Released in June 1908, the book sold more than 19,000 copies in its first five months and was reprinted 10 times in its first year. It garnered widespread acclaim, including endorsements from Canadian poet Bliss Carman and American author Mark Twain, who called Anne “the dearest, most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice.”

17. Montgomery’s body of work — more than 500 short stories, 20 novels, two poetry collections and numerous journal and essay anthologies — has sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide.  Short Story Collections • Chronicles of Avonlea (1912) • Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920)

18. Montgomery’s fiction returns again and again to representations and narratives related to questions of motherhood and maternity. Her novels and stories repeatedly focus on orphans, children abandoned by parents or separated from them, and children in the care of unloving relations, as well as absent mothers and childless women or “spinsters.” Much of Montgomery's writing, regards motherhood as crucial work for women and focuses primarily on the education of girls.

19. 20th Century Canadian Novel SaraJeannetteDuncan (1861-1922)

20. SaraJeannetteDuncan(1861-1922)

21. In her numerous novels, short story collection, two autobiographical works, extensive journalism and twelve unpublished plays, Duncan returns again and again to the question of cultural displacement.

22. Her novels include: • The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib(London and New York, 1893); • An American Girl in London • (1891); • A Voyage of Consolation (1898) • Those Delightful Americans (1902) • Imperialist (1904) • 'His Royal Happiness' (Toronto and New York, 1914);

23. Duncan is best known today for her 1904 novel The Imperialist, which tells the story of Lorne Murchison, a young lawyer in the fictional town of Elgin, Ontario who becomes an advocate of imperial preferential trade and unsuccessfully runs for the Parliament of Canada for the Liberal Party. The book has been widely praised by scholars as a sensitive and perceptive portrait of small-town Ontario at the turn of the twentieth century, and at the social mores of the time and place.

24. Stephen Leacock (1869-1944)

25. Born in Swanmore, England in 1869 Stephen Leacock is one of Canada's great writers of humorous fiction. • His first collection of humorous stories Literary Lapses appeared in 1910,. • Two most important books of humor are: • Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914 • Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) -Based on his many summers spent in Orillia, Ontario and other childhood experiences, it was very popular in Canada, the United States and England.

26. Education • He received his schooling at Upper Canada College, Toronto, after which he entered Toronto University and graduated in 1891. He then spent eight years at his former school as modern language master, from 1891 to 1899, leaving to take a fellowship at Chicago University, and received the degree of Ph.D. in 1903. During the other half of these last two years he had been engaged as lecturer in political economy at McGill University, Montreal, and since 1903 he has been connected with that institution, becoming in 1905 associate professor of political economy and history and in 1908 professor of political economy and head of the Department of Economics and Political Science. 

27. His earliest books were educational and historical in character e.g,‘Elements of Political Economy,’ 1905.These were followed by some smaller historical and biographical works, and it was not until 1910 that he gathered together a number of his humorous sketches and short stories and published them in a very modest form, under the apologetic title of ‘Literary Lapses

28. Their success was immediate, and they were followed in 1911 by ‘Nonsense Novels,’ consisting chiefly of satirical exaggerations of the absurdities of various current formulæ of popular fiction. • In 1912 there appeared ‘Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town,’ which still ranks as the author’s most important creative work, containing a number of most carefully observed portraits of character-types of present-day Canadian life, and of ordinary Canadian people, with a far greater insight into the social and economic conditions of Canada than has been shown by any other author. ‘

29. In Sunshine Sketches the fictional "Little Town" is Mariposa on the shore of Lake Wissanotti. • The work is populated with timeless archetypes of small towns, treated carefully with affection and humour.

30. Sunshine Sketches is a treatment of the incongruities between appearances and reality, or illusion and reality. The book is a humorous treatment of characters, actions, and themes which illustrate the incongruity between appearances and reality, aspiration and achievement, intention and realization. The humour of the Sketches is in most instances self-evident. Because Leacock treats his subjects humourously, ironically, satirically, much of the tension and many of the questions which arise the incongruity between appearances and reality must remain unresolved.

31. The book is a humorous treatment of characters, actions, and themes which illustrate the incongruity between appearances and reality, aspiration and achievement, intention and realization. The humour of the Sketches is in most instances self-evident, Leacock treats his subjects humourously, ironically, satirically and much of the tension and many of the questions which arise the incongruity between appearances and reality must remain unresolved.

32. „Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich“ was a good-humored exposition of the numerous social and economic anomalies resulting from the development of an exceedingly wealthy class in a young and supposedly democratic community. • The short story cycle portrays the full flowering in a large, unnamed American city (actually based on Montréal) of the seeds of corrupt materialism and individualism already detected in smalltown Mariposa.

33. The plutocrats who inhabit Plutoria Avenue pursue money and power, and unrestricted capitalism corrupts the city's social, religious, educational, and political institutions. Arcadian Adventuresexposes to laughter and ridicule the human greed, hypocrisy and pride behind such things as stock-market scams, the rage for mystical experience, the back-to-nature vogue, financially expedient ecumenism and muck-raking politics.

34. The underlying quality which makes Stephen Leacock’s humor valuable and enlightening is the extreme accuracy of his observation both of human types and of the conditions in which they move and develop.

35. His literary mechanism consists chiefly of a very easy and conversational, almost confidential, style, not unreminiscent of Dickens, but containing a suggestion also of the classic American humorists in its unexpected quips and turns of phrase. “The more I mix with the millionaires, the more I enjoy the things they mix,” is a typical example of this form of wit, both in its neatness and in the fact that it clothes a characteristically sardonic comment upon its subject-matter. 

36. He is good-humored, with the good humor of the detached and philosophical observer, convinced that all the world’s ills can be comfortably borne if one can only learn to laugh at them. There are no villains in his stories, and in his parodies the typical villains of ordinary moralizing fiction are reduced to their logical absurdity; for he has unbounded sympathy with everything that is human.