CHAPTER XXI
Fiction Writers
THE COMMUNITY NOVEL—MONTGOMERY—KEITH—MCCLUNG—LE ROSSIGNOL. INSTITUTIONAL FICTION—PACKARD—SULLIVAN—DUNCAN—WALLACE AND OTHERS. REALISTIC ROMANCE—SERVICE—CODY—STEAD, ETC. HISTORICAL FICTION—SNIDER—ANISON NORTH—TESKEY—MCKISHNIE—COONEY. IMAGINATIVE FICTION—PICKTHALL—MACKAY. MISCELLANEOUS TYPES—MCKISHNIE—SULLIVAN—HÉMON—SIME. THE NEW REALISM—SALVERSON—DE LA ROCHE—CORNELL, ETC.
1. The Community Novel.
Until the ‘nineties’ the production of Canadian fiction had been spasmodic and scattered, but the success of Gilbert Parker, Marshall Saunders, and other Canadian writers who gained a hearing first in lands alien to their own, and whose work came back to Canada ‘with an alienated majesty,’ proved that Canada was rich in literary material. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a marked increase in fiction writing in Canada. The new writers were influenced not only by the example of their compatriots but by that of the fiction writers of Great Britain and the United States. They began to realize that life around them was as interesting as Barrie’s Thrums or Bret Harte’s California. There was, too, a growing reading public ready to appreciate stories that presented the adventure, the humor, and the pathos of the daily life of themselves, their neighbors, or their fellow-Canadians in other parts of the country and sometimes of other racial origins.
Hence arose the Community Novel or type of story. One of the earlier examples is Adeline M. Teskey’s Where the Sugar Maple Grows (1901). In telling of the origin of this book, Miss Teskey wrote that when reading Ian MacLaren’s Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush she said within herself, ‘I know just as interesting people in Canada.’ Her sketches of village characters, depicted with a homely but effective simplicity of style, showed that she was right. A delightfully humorous novel of Cranfordian flavor, The Specimen Spinster, by Kate Westlake Yeigh, (1906), essayed a larger canvas instead of the smaller etchings and gave an insight into the social relationships of the rural village.
The year 1908 may be said to mark the real beginning of the Second Renaissance in Canadian fiction, for in that year there were published three novels of the Community type—Anne of Green Gables, by L. M. Montgomery; Duncan Polite, by Marian Keith; Sowing Seeds in Danny, by Nellie L. McClung. There appeared also a charming collection of short tales, Little Stories of Quebec, by James Le Rossignol. This date is still further significant as the year in which Marjorie Pickthall published her first important short story, La Tristesse, in The Atlantic Monthly, although her work differs greatly in setting and artistic method from the fiction of the Community type.
L. M. Montgomery was born at Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and spent her childhood in Cavendish, a seashore farming settlement which figures as ‘Avonlea’ in her stories. That her life has been spent chiefly within the limits of the little island province and the bounds of an Ontario country parish does not narrow her outlook although she confines herself to themes bounded by rural experiences, for her forte is the portrayal of what she has seen and knows. She has imaginative and creative gifts, but she uses these in enabling us to see the beauty, the humour, and the pathos that lies about our daily paths.
Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, has an interesting history. Upon being asked for a short serial story for a Sunday School weekly, she cast about for a plot idea. A faded note book entry suggested: ‘Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy; a girl is sent to them.’ The writing of a serial was started, but time did not allow the author to complete it for the purpose intended. As she brooded over the theme it began to expand and the result was a book which may be confidently labelled a ‘Canadian classic.’
In Anne we have an entirely new character in fiction, a high-spirited, sensitive girl, with a wonderfully vivid imagination; wise beyond her years, outspoken and daring: not always good but always lovable. Her longing for a real home, and an interest in her very quaintness, ends in her being established as a member of the Green Gables family. It is Anne who dominates the whole story. There are other characters, quaint too, and well-drawn, but the introduction of Anne into the community—Anne, so unconventional so imaginative, and so altogether different from the staid, prosaic, general attitude of the neighbourhood—proves to be the invasion of a peculiar ferment, and the incidents which discover the process of fermentation are most delightfully odd and mirth-provoking.