Sara Jeannette Duncan
First trained as a teacher in a normal school, she took to poetry early in life and after a brief teaching period worked as a travel writer for Canadian newspapers and a columnist for the Toronto Globe.
A period of supply teaching in the Brantford area ended in December 1884, when she travelled to New Orleans after persuading The Globe newspaper in Toronto and the Advertiser in London, Ontario to pay her for articles about the World Cotton Centennial.
Her biographer, Misao Dean, says that "well-suited to the Week, her strongly defined progressive views on international copyright, women's suffrage, and realist fiction made her work remarkable in such conservative journals as the Globe and the Post.
She also cultivated a friendship with James Louis Garvin while he was editor of The Outlook and The Observer, at least in part hoping he might find a position for Everard in Britain.
[3][14] Duncan had been treated for tuberculosis in 1900, spending the summer out of doors in the fresh air of Simla, as chronicled in On the Other Side of the Latch (1901), published in the United States and Canada as The Crow's Nest.
[15] Among Duncan's contacts in the literary world were the journalists Goldwin Smith (of the Week) and John Stephen Willison, the novelist and editor Jean McIlwraith, and George William Ross.
Generally, she followed a nineteenth-century tradition of "society" novels in which personal and public politics might play a part – epitomised by writers such as William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.
[18] Particularly adept with dialogue but less so with point of view,[19] much of her work is ironic in tone and, according to Dean, attempts to define representative types of characters, often nationally or culturally differentiated.
Her work frequently focuses on females, addressing their ethical and personal choices in the context of their dual imperative to develop as individuals and represent moral ideas.
Duncan thus creates a kind of heroine who defines herself through love, travel, and artistic vocation, and whose gender politics is linked to a critique of imperial-colonial relations.
According to Dean, the book "relies on the strengths of Duncan's journalism – close observation, description of manners, and wry humour – while transforming the narrator's travelling companion from the sophisticated Lewis into a naive and romantic English girl."
The autobiographical On the Other Side of the Latch (1901) was set in Duncan's garden in Simla, where she had been forced to spend seven months while recovering from her tuberculosis infection.
Duncan occasionally strayed from the subject of Anglo-Indian society and is best-known and most studied today for The Imperialist, a 1904 work which was her only novel set in Canada and centers on a fictional town modeled on Brantford.
[3][22] It had at best a mixed reception: Germaine Warkentin says that despite being "the first truly modern Canadian novel", it was too progressive for its audience, poorly received and remained largely unread until the 1960s.
[23] Dean says that at the time of publication The London Spectator complained that it hid a medicinal message in a spoonful of jam while the Globe asserted that Duncan was disqualified by her gender from writing on political subjects.
Duncan's is a rare and subtle look, for the period, at how the economic and political workings of imperialism affect women and the private sphere of personal relations.
[3] Today, says Warkentin, with the exception of The Imperialist, Duncan's œuvre "appears only occasionally in the writings of students of feminism and post-colonialism trawling the backwaters of the Edwardian novel, and almost never in accounts of Anglo-Indian literature".
