Sara Jeannette Duncan was born in 1861 in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. By 1889, when she first visited India, she had already established a reputation, both in Canada and the United States, as an articulate journalist and a versatile publicist of topical issues. In India she met Charles Everard Coates, an Anglo-Indian whom she married in 1891. She then lived in India, almost continuously, for more than twenty years. Of the nineteen works of fiction which she completed, before her death in London in 1922, nine deal with her Indian experience.

Miss Duncan's first Indian work, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893) records the experiences of an English girl, Helen Frances Peachey, who leaves home to marry an Anglo-Indian clerk in Calcutta. If the record of Helen's new experiences appears monotonous, the monotony is relieved by an ironic tone which prevails in the contrast between the heroine's own culture and the exotic customs of Anglo-Indians. The tone throughout is genial, without malice, but it lacks seriousness. The author seems less concerned with analysing the actual—psychological and intellectual—effect of India upon her heroine than with providing factual information about routine, everyday, aspects of Anglo-Indian society.

Vernon's Aunt, Miss Duncan's third Indian work, parallels Memsahib both in its vivid record of Anglo-Indian customs and in its prevailing humour which, again, is sustained by the ironic contrast between the heroine's English culture and the exotic manners of Anglo-Indians. The novel, however, is notable for its description of a love affair—at any rate, an attempted one—between Miss Moffat and Abdul Karim Bux, a middle-aged, half-educated Moslem clerk who works under Vernon Hawkins. Bux is the only one who takes his advances to Miss Moffat seriously, and the one-sided affair is doomed from the start. When he first conducts Miss Moffat from the railway station to meet her nephew, he warns her not to disclose their (as he believes) spontaneous intimacy to Hawkins:

Mr. Ockinis—I do not know—Mr. Ockinis may not like that I find favour with Miss Eemuffitty. I think Mr. Ockinis may be jealous that I have touch the heart of his so intelligent ant! I think it will be better madam does not say she has isspoken to me.

His speech alone proves that his romantic feelings for an English memsahib are preposterous; and when, in the end, these feelings lead him to commit irregularities in his job, Bux is lucky to get away with mere blows and a reprimand from Hawkins. Serious implications of the love affair—the psychological conflicts of interracial marriage, or the moral aspects of sexual union between a member of the ruling caste and one of the ruled—are not considered.

As Memsahib and Vernon's Aunt show, Miss Duncan's books provide an authentic and closely-observed, if superficial record of Anglo-Indian society in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. In some books, where the social portrait is not the chief objective, Miss Duncan uses it as a background for stories of adventure, or intrigue and romance. The Story of Soaiy Sahib (1894) for example, is a Kiplingesque story of an English boy who is cared for by Indians during the Indian mutiny. The boy is finally "rescued" by English troops, but nobly refuses to divulge military secrets of his Indian benefactors. The Pool in the Desert (1903), a volume of four long stories, also illustrates the author's skill in constructing fluent and vivid romantic narratives. At the same time, the unlikely complications, sudden convenient coincidences, and pointless anticlimax in these narratives confirm the general impression of Miss Duncan's Indian books as being less concerned with serious, artistic criteria than with light, good-humoured melodrama.

But the humour and melodramatic interests of those books so far mentioned do not completely obscure a serious theme which shows itself more openly in the author's remaining Indian novels. Hints of the theme are given in Memshib and Vernon's Aunt where some English characters show awareness of British moral responsibility to people in less developed or less powerful societies. This awareness of "the mother country's duty to the heathen masses who look to her for light and guidance" partly inspires nineteenth-century Imperialism, which forms the main theme of Miss Duncan's most ambitious writing about India. Miss Duncan's view of Imperialism was strongly influenced by her Canadian experience; for by the 1890's, Canadians were among the foremost supporters of a proposed Federation of the British Empire aimed at furthering the cause of Imperialism. The proposal was for a more egalitarian and pragmatic regrouping of British Colonies and Dominions in order to promote the social, cultural, political, and economic welfare of all members of the Federation: Britain would provide cultural prestige and political stability; the white Dominions would open their vast natural resources to economic investment; and the ensuing prosperity and security would better enable Britain and the Dominions to bear "the great Imperial sacrifice" of moral upliftment in the black colonies of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. From a Canadian point of view, too, such a Federation had the not inconsiderable virtue of helping to stave off the threat of possible political annexation or economic absorption by the United States.

So far as her Indian fiction is concerned, Miss Duncan's fullest treatment of Imperialism appears in three novels—His Honour and a Lady (1896), Set in Authority (1906), and Burnt Offering (1909). The action in all three novels takes place during the last quarter of the last century. The action of His Honour and a Lady centres on the conflict between John Church who is Governor of Bengal, and Lewis Ancram who is his Chief Secretary. The conflict between the two men derives from their different approaches to Imperialism. Church's approach is religiously inspired, though undesirable:

He [Church] believes this earth was created to give him an atmosphere to do his duty in; and he does it with the invincible courage of short-sightedness combined with the notion that the ultimate court of appeal for eighty million Bengalis should be his precious Methodist conscience.

Church's commitment to Indian "progress" makes him favour higher education for Indians. Ancram however, who pays lip service to Church's policies while treacherously aiding his opponents, believes that higher education will be harmful to Indians within the existing colonial conditions:

When we have helped these people [Indians] to shatter all their notions of reverence and submission and self-abnegation and piety, and given them, for such ideals as their fathers had, the scepticism of the West, I don't know that we shall have accomplished much to our credit.

In Ancram's view, higher education encourages economic dislocation and creates "a starveling class that find nothing to do but swell mass meetings on the Maidan and talk sedition." His approach to Imperialism, as the author explicitly states, is more paternalistic than Church's. The conflict between the two men is partially reconciled by Church's death; but it reappears when Ancram becomes Governor and wishes to marry Church's widow Judith. Then Judith accidentally discovers Ancram's former treachery to her dead husband and rejects his suit.

Lord Thane, the principal character of Set in Authority is modelled on Lord Ripon who was Viceroy of India from 1880 to 1884. Like his historical prototype, Lord Thane attempts to reform Anglo-Indian administration to bring it more in line with his own idealistic views of Imperialism. His attempts focus on the trial of a British soldier, Morgan, who is accused of kicking an Indian servant to death. Lord Thane insists not only that Morgan should be tried for the alleged offence, but that he should be tried by an Indian judge. The first half of the novel sets the scene for a presumably gripping climax as Morgan is condemned to be hanged by Justice Sir Ahmed Hoosein. Morgan's fellow soldiers protest vehemently against the verdict, and as his execution approaches, are close to virtual mutiny. The Anglo-Indian community as a whole, in sympathy with the soldiers, send a letter of protest to Queen Victoria. Anarchy seems near. But Lord Thane resolutely stands by his Imperialistic ideals of justice, and refuses to intervene. Then, on the eve of his expected execution, Morgan commits suicide by swallowing opium. Soon after, Lord Thane is recalled to England in premature retirement, and public hysteria subsides.

Burnt Offering, the last of Miss Duncan's Indian works, describes the visit of a British Member of Parliament to India. The MP, Vulcan Mills, is accompanied by his daughter Joan, who is strongly influenced by her father's radical, political views. Both of them are outraged by what they perceive to be abuses of Anglo-Indian officialdom. They quickly throw in their lot with a revolutionary Indian group that is led by Ganendra Thakore whose adopted son, Bepin Behari Dey, is one of the most active members of the group. Prolonged political association leads Dey to fall in love with Joan Mills and propose marriage. Meanwhile, Joan receives a second proposal from John Game, Secretary to the Government of India in the Home Department. But she accepts Dey. Then the promise of another tense climax is unfulfilled: Thakore is given a summary conviction; Mills is transported from India with peremptory haste; and Dey is arrested. Dey is later released on bail, whereupon he tries to shoot the Viceroy, misses, and wounds Game instead; he then commits suicide. Joan returns to England.

The characters of Burnt Offering are as disembodied as those of His Honour and a Lady and Set in Authority. Its action is equally undramatic, and its plot just as perfunctory; for the obvious tension implicit in subjects such as sedition, revolution, attempted assassination, interracial marriage, is again substantially diluted by pervasive reportage. Altogether these three novels reveal much information about social attitudes, political grievances, and popular opinions in late Victorian India; but they give no consistent personal reactions, or definite individual responses to these attitudes, grievances, and opinions. On the whole the information they provide is so generalized that it is just as readily available in nonfictional forms such as letters, journals, travel narratives, newspaper articles, or polemical treatises. Consequently they are less interesting as works of fiction than as documents of social history or polemical exposition. Consequently too, Miss Duncan's role as a novelist must be taken essentially as that of a publicist: one who dramatises public issues in an impersonal, generalized way, by stressing the importance of their ideological implications, while largely neglecting the psychological implications and human interest normally generated by such issues.

Miss Duncan's role as a publicist works effectively in "non-serious" books such as Memsahib and Vernon's Aunt which are, frankly, dramatised social documents. Since these novels do not study a coherent theme, their varied assortment of social or historical information, garnished with wit and good humour, can prove extremely palatable, even if their intrinsic artistic value is no more than modest. But where a coherent theme—Imperialism—is involved, for example, in the three novels just discussed, or in The Imperialist which deals with Imperialism in Canada, the author's exclusive role as a publicist is artistically damaging. Miss Duncan's main theme is brilliantly described in these four novels, usually by portraying its more striking aspects in conflict with each other. But since this conflict is not also represented, convincingly, in psychological terms, its resolution seems less the inevitable result of plausible motives than of the author's arbitrary will in contriving any smooth or convenient denouement. Nor is this contrivance just psychologically implausible: in dramatic terms, it is often anticlimactic, and in terms of thematic significance, sometimes self-contradictory and confusing. It is the general feeling of uncertainty and confusion, emphasized by the contrived denouement in these four novels, that damages their sense of conviction, their coherence, and ultimately, their artistic worth.

Judith Church's rejection of Ancram at the end of His Honour and a Lady serves no discernible purpose beyond providing a faintly salacious flavour to a smoothly melodramatic conclusion which, so far as the theme is concerned, lacks coherence or significance. The end of Set in Authority too, is either incoherent or self-contradictory. The main action in the novel is designed to win sympathy for the hero's political views, by consistently implying that Indians are victims of an oppressive Anglo-Indian administration. After Morgan's (anti)climactic suicide, however, it is discovered that the Indian witness whose evidence secured his conviction bore a grudge against British soldiers. While this discovery no doubt contributes an extra melo-dramatic flourish, it also contradicts the preceding action by inducing sympathy for Anglo-Indian "villians" and casting suspicion on their Indian "victims." Similarly, in Burnt Offering, Dey's suicide is not strictly demanded by the need of the plot to demonstrate the failure of the revolutionary movement: this need is already amply satisfied by Thakore's conviction, Mills's deportation, and Dey's own arrest. Dey's death is another of the author's belated flourishes, which does not serve a thematic function but promotes a sensational denouement. His death may also be a racist ploy to prevent Dey's marriage to Joan Mills, at all costs. At any rate, it illustrates Miss Duncan's expert use of slick, literary techniques presumably to satisfy popular taste. While these techniques do not obstruct the principal aim in these novels, which is to publicize topical issues, they infringe strictly artistic criteria such as thematic coherence, dramatic consistency, and psychological plausibility.

The Imperialist contains probably the best examples of the artistic weaknesses that are being discussed here. The novel is set in Canada at the turn of century, and describes the political views of Lorne Murchison, a Liberal Party candidate who is an ardent and committed Imperialist. The author devotes most of her novel to Murchison as he expounds his political, economic, and social arguments in favour of Imperialism. The extreme passion and intensity of Murchison's arguments clearly imply the author's own sympathy for Murchison's views. But in the end, Murchison is eased out of his candidacy, which he tamely accepts, although it means the frustration of his Imperialistic hopes. The pattern here is the same as in the three Indian novels dealing with Imperialism. Like Lord Thane, Murchison's tame reaction to defeat is psychologically implausible because, like the Viceroy, he is presented throughout the action as passionate, zealous, and resolute. His quiet departure from political life, like Lord Thane's silent return to England, is simply out of character. As in the Indian novels too, there are elements of anticlimax and self-contradiction in The Imperialist. Murchison's defeat, like Morgan's suicide or Dey's death, is abrupt, presented without explanation or without the tragic sense due to such an ostensibly climactic event. It also contradicts the novel's previously implied avowal of Imperialism. If The Imperialist is more memorable than its Indian counterparts, it is not for intrinsic artistic reasons; for the presentation of its main theme is confusing and its human interest is implausible or negligible. The Imperialist is remembered because it effectively displays public issues of Miss Duncan's homeland which she knew best and felt most deeply about. Her authoritative knowledge and undoubted technical skill combine, in this novel, to produce perhaps the best description that exists in fiction of Canadian provincial attitudes at the turn of the century.

Her provincial Canadian background influences Miss Duncan's mixed artistic achievement in so far as it fails to provide a stable literary and cultural tradition upon which she can draw. At the start of her writing career, Canada was still a "colonial nation": a self-governing state which felt it could retain political independence, while maintaining existing (colonial) cultural ties with Great Britain. This need for divided loyalty—both to Canada and Great Britain—created an ambivalent outlook which is evident in Canadian politics, culture, and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Stephen Leacock, the most distinguished Canadian writer of Miss Duncan's generation, exploits his peculiar national outlook with good artistic effect. In many other Canadian writers, however, Leacock's double-edged irony is replaced by contradiction and incoherence. E. J. Pratt, for example, is constantly troubled by a profound sense of ambivalence that flaws some of his major poems, for example, "The Truant" which seems to advocate both atheism and orthodox Christianity. Miss Duncan's self-contradiction can therefore be attributed, to some extent at least, to profoundly ambivalent cultural conditions, which not only promoted her faith in Imperialism, but encouraged her to apply this faith, rashly and indiscriminately, to a people of alien culture and ancient civilization. When applied to India, her (Canadian-based) Imperialism seems self-righteous and sentimental because, like the views of some of her English characters, it derives from vague, generalized feelings rather than from specific, personal experience and real knowledge of individual Indians within their local environment. This is why Miss Duncan has difficulty in reconciling her (theoretical) commitment to Imperialism with the (practical) abuses which she observed in India. But, as biographical evidence proves, she held steadfastly to her faith in Imperialism, despite the evidence of her eyes. Hence the febrile vacillation in her novels, between praise and dissatisfaction toward Imperialism.

Technically, Miss Duncan's writing is influenced by Victorian novelists who may not always be precisely identified. Her fluent diction and racy dialogue may owe something to Thackeray; but these features are as standard in novels of the period as her mechanically well-designed, chronologically-based plots. Her fondness for unlikely complications, superficial intrigue and insignificant sensational flourishes may be more directly traceable to lesser Victorian novelists who indulged in intrigue and melodrama at the expense of psychological insight and realistic detail. There may also be a trace of Henry James's belief in human intelligence as the real theatre of personal conflicts and dilemmas. James successfully insinuates the tensions and conflicts of his characters into intellectual relationships which are elaborately analysed, often at inordinate length, to produce action that seems over-refined and rarefied. This is paralleled in Miss Duncan's novels by the general paucity of dramatic action and a corresponding excess of lengthy discussion, commentary, and debate. But if her fiction does acquire a certain Jamesian perfunctoriness, it does not acquire the penetrating psychological examination and intricate moral analysis which make Henry James a classic novelist.

When all possible ideological, cultural, and technical influences are considered, however, Miss Duncan's fiction must, finally, be viewed in the perspective of the literature of the British Empire produced by authors as varied as Henty, Kipling, Conrad, and in our own time, Somerset Maugham, John Masters, and Mazo de la Roche. The most important of these writers—Conrad, Kipling, Cary, Forster, Orwell—generally analyses the exact consequences of colonial rule for both coloniser and colonised, although their political views may vary greatly. Kipling, for example, gives an informed analysis of the effect of British rule in India, incorporating both its ideological and psychological implications. It is true that in stories such as "The Head of the District" and "Lispeth," his own ideological stance is warped—too subjectively in favour of Imperialism. But despite such jingoistic bias, Kipling's stories generally provide realistic action in which the reader can share, and on which he can pass judgement. The stories of the less important writers of the British Empire generally provide unrealistic action in which the Imperial setting is largely an exotic location for romantic adventure and intrigue. In such stories, the interests and preoccupations of the characters are mainly personal or idiosyncratic, remote from the actual conditions and practical problems of their local, colonial environment. Miss Duncan is best placed among this second category of writers, whose work is less notable for its rendering of actual human experience than for its description of fresh subjects, strange customs, and exotic scenery.

More exactly, Miss Duncan can be placed in the specific category of Anglo-Indian writers such as Sir George T. Chesney, Sir Henry S. Cunningham, and particularly Mrs. Flora Annie Steel who was, according to an earlier commentator [E. F. Oaten in A Sketchbook of Anglo-Indian Literature, 1908], "perhaps the greatest novelist, in the strictest sense of the word, of whom Anglo-Indian literature can boast." After giving an outline of the history of Anglo-Indian literature, from the letters and travel narratives of its beginnings, to the more sophisticated forms achieved by the 1890's when Miss Duncan was writing, the same commentator concludes that, although its forms had changed, the basic substance of Anglo-Indian literature remained "the light and shade" of Anglo-Indian life:

Those Anglo-Indian writers who attempted fiction can be said to have achieved their principal, if modest aim, that of giving a more or less faithful picture of native or Anglo-Indian life in a form more attractive than the hackneyed "Letters" or volume of travels which were such a marked feature of the early literature.

This helps us to understand why Miss Duncan's Indian fiction is exclusively preoccupied with material which lends itself to expression, just as readily, in nonfictional forms: she was partly following the fashion of the historical literary situation in which she found herself. The best that can be said of her Indian fiction, as a whole, is that it gives as vivid and authentic a portrait of general customs and public attitudes as can be seen in such Anglo-Indian "classics" as Chesney's The Dilemma (1876), and Mrs. Steel's On the Face of the Waters (1896).

The best writing of Miss Duncan's career is her professional journalism for North American newspapers such as the Globe, the Washington Post, and the Montreal Star. This early work, done before she went to India, is distinguished for its lucid commentary and fluent exposition, which make even her more pungent views, for example her feminist ones, appear congenial and convincing. Her best novels—they are more accurately described as social sketches rather than novels—employ the structure of a travelogue, as in Memsahib and Vernon's Aunt. The effectiveness of this structure is seen in On the Other Side of the Latch (1901), the most successful of the author's Indian works, which simply consists of the random thoughts and occasional observations of the wife of an Anglo-Indian official during a summer spent in Simla, the North Indian hill station. It is as if, freed from the encumbrance of a plot in which incidents must convey significance within a comprehensive pattern, Miss Duncan is able to express her most sincerely-felt thoughts, most convincingly. Nor does she lay any claim to seriousness. Her literary interests were, frankly, superficial, topical, domestic, as her narrator hints:

I have not yet formed a precise opinion as to the function of the commonplace in matter intended for publication. But surely no one should scorn domestic details, which make our universal background and mainstay of our existence. Theories and abstractions serve to adorn it and to give us a notion of ourselves; but we keep them mostly for lectures and sermons, the monthly reviews, the original young man who comes to tea. All would be glad to shine at odd times, but the most luminous demonstration may very probably be based upon a hatred of tinned salmon and a preference for cotton sheets.

It is no accident that her best novels, An American Girl in London (1891) and Cousin Cinderella (1908), if not exactly concerned with "a hatred for tinned salmon and a preference for cotton sheets," are preoccupied with similarly commonplace subjects—broad social practices and general cultural differences—which are most effectively treated by means of commentary and exposition, the publicist's skills at which Miss Duncan is most adept.