Sara Jeannette Duncan

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Sara Jeannette Duncan, (22 December 1861 – 22 July 1922), was a Canadian author and journalist. She was called Sara Jeannette Cotes after her marriage to Everard Cotes in 1891, but is most often referred to by her maiden name. Her column at the Toronto Globe and other publications, was under the pseudonym Garth and pen name, Garth Grafton.

Born in 1861 in Brantford, Ontario, Duncan first worked there as a schoolteacher before taking up writing journalism as a full-time occupation. Various freelancing work led to her taking her first position at the Washington Post in 1885.

In 1886, Duncan made history as the first woman to be hired as a professional journalist in Canada, taking a regular position at the Toronto Globe, now the Globe and Mail. At the Globe, as Garth Grafton, she interviewd Emily Pauline Johnson, a former schoolmate from Brantford. She later moved to the Montreal Star, where she was the paper's Parliamentary correspondent.

Her first book, A Social Departure (1890), documented an around-the-world trip. On this trip, she met Everard Cotes, a journalist and museum curator based in Calcutta, whom she wed in 1891. After her marriage, Duncan moved from journalism to fiction.

Duncan is best known today for her 1904 novel The Imperialist, which tells the story of Lorne Murchison, a young lawyer in the fictional town of Elgin, Ontario who becomes an advocate of imperial preferential trade and unsuccessfully runs for the Parliament of Canada for the Liberal Party. The book has been widely praised by scholars as a sensitive and perceptive portrait of small-town Ontario at the turn of the twentieth century, and at the social mores of the time and place. While it has been lauded for its subtle grasp of women's place in society, it has also been criticized for focusing on upper-class and middle-class people over workers and the poor, and for its brutally racist depiction of Aboriginal people.

At the time of its publication, The Imperialist was not successful, but many of Duncan's other novels were. Most involved a character out of his or her national culture, and the tensions and complexities that resulted. Like Henry James, Duncan's literary world was Transatlantic. [Broadview Press] has republished The Imperialist, as well as two other Duncan novels, Set in Authority and The Pool in the Desert.

Duncan's mannered and ironic writing style can be compared to contemporary satirists such as Stephen Leacock and Thomas Carlyle.

Sara Jeannette Duncan died in 1922 at Ashtead, Surrey, England.

[edit] References

Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire by Thomas Tausky (Port Credit, Ontario: P. D. Meany, 1980)
A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan by Misao Dean (Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 1991)