Faith, Fiction, and Fame

In 1908, two Canadian women published first novels that became instant best-sellers. Nellie McClung¿s Sowing Seeds in Danny initially outsold Lucy Maud Montgomery¿s Anne of Green Gables, but by 1965 McClung¿s book had largely disappeared from Canadian consciousness. The popularity of Anne, on the other hand, has continued to the present, and Anne has received far more academic and critical attention, especially since 1985. It is only recently that Anne of Green Gables has been criticized for its ideology in the same manner as Sowing Seeds in Danny. One hypothesis is that Danny¿s relatively speedy disappearance was partly due to a shift in Canadians¿ religious worldview over the twentieth century as church attendance and biblical literacy gradually declined. McClung¿s rhetorical strategies look back to the dominant Protestantism of the nineteenth century, in contrast to Montgomery¿s, which look forward to the twentieth-century¿s waning of religious faith. Likewise, the recent critical challenges to both novels spring from a worldview at odds with the predominantly Christian worldview of 1908.