Ellen “Nellie” Letitia (Mooney) McClung was born in Chatsworth, Ontario on October 20, 1873. Her family moved to Wawanesa, Manitoba in 1880 and upon graduation from the Winnipeg Normal School at the age of 16, she began her teaching career at Manitou, Manitoba. In 1896 she married Robert Wesley McClung, a pharmacist in Manitou. In 1908, her first novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny, was published. Other novels, essays, short stories, and sketches soon followed and continued to appear into her seventieth year. The McClung's moved to Winnipeg in 1911 when Robert took up work with an insurance company. Nellie became active in various organizations, including the Canadian Women's Press Club and the Winnipeg Political Equality League. Her activities in temperance and women's suffrage leagues continued when they moved to Edmonton in 1914 where she campaigned vigorously for social reform and women's rights. She served in the Alberta Legislature with the Liberals from 1921 to 1926. After her political defeat she fought to establish Canadian women's rights to seats in the Senate. In 1933 the McClung family moved to Victoria, B.C.. From 1936 to 1942 she served as the first woman member of the CBC Board of Governors. In 1938 she represented Canada as a delegate to the League of Nations. She died in 1951 at the age of 77.

The fonds consists of correspondence, newspaper clippings, handwritten and typescript copies of published and unpublished works, notes for speeches, scrapbooks and a photograph album. The original manuscripts (the first rough drafts) in the McClung fonds are contained in nine boxes. The articles and novels are written in scribblers. Where a title has been placed at the start of a composition, this has been noted in the list below. Each scribbler has been examined but the list of titles is not necessarily comprehensive. The photograph album was transferred to Visual Records, accession 198307-001. The over-sized address presented to the McClungs by the citizens of Manitou (vol. 63) was found in a drawer in 2008 and was added to MS-0010.