Creating a Canadian Pantheon

In 1938, the feminist social reformer, novelist, devout Methodist and temperance crusader Nellie McClung was asked by Prime Minister Mackenzie King to represent Canada at a meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva. Her son, Mark, a Rhodes Scholar, came down from Oxford to meet her. The two went out to dine and at the end of the meal, Mark persuaded her to let him order a couple of mild after-dinner drinks.

When the drinks arrived, McClung, then 65, would not touch a drop. “I am too old to change,” she told him.

This anecdote, heavy with subtext, is told for the first time in Charlotte Gray’s compact biography Nellie McClung. It does not appear in Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis’s Firing the Heather: The Life and Times of Nellie McClung (1993), the only full-dress biography. We glimpse through it the tensions between mother and son, youth and age, Europe and Canada, religion and secularism, and something more: the way in which the ideals...