SOURCE: "The Changing Masks of Empire: Notes on Some Novels by Sara Jeannette Duncan," in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 13, 1983, pp. 210-27.

Sara Jeannette Duncan is a better and more interesting writer than the caprices of posthumous reputation have allowed. For almost forty years of her relatively short life she was an industrious and capable journalist (writing for Canadian, American, and eventually Indian papers) and she wrote twenty books which appeared in her lifetime or shortly afterwards. Most of them were published in both London and New York, and some in Toronto as well. From the beginning of her career they were on the whole well received, and in the latter part of her career she generally gained the respect that is accorded a writer of acknowledged standing. Like other Canadian writers of her time she was probably more highly regarded abroad, where in any case she spent half her life, than in her native Canada.

The fate of posthumous oblivion after a life of success is not uncommon among writers, but rarely so complete as it has been in the case of Sara Duncan. She wrote six novels about India, where the last thirty years of her life were mostly spent, yet her name is not even mentioned in any of the recent studies of Anglo-Indian writing (such as Allen J. Greenberger's The British Image of India (1960) and Belinda Parry's Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination (1962)), though her novels of British life in India are better written than those of such contemporaries as Maud Diver and Flora Annie Steele, to whom considerable attention has recently been paid, and more interesting for the light they throw on the social life and the political motivations of the imperialists.

There is in fact only one book by Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist, that is now at all well known, and this owes its revived reputation to the attempt on the part of Canadian scholars and critics to create a past for the national literature which, as a recognizable tradition, is a comparatively recent one with few native roots. The Imperialist is a bright, perceptive, and somewhat nostalgic novel about Canadian political life in a small Ontario town, which Duncan wrote more than a decade after she left Canada to become a chota memsahib in Calcutta. Reprinted in 1961 as a paperback in the New Canadian Library, it has been fairly widely read since then, and is now recognized as one of the few mature and sophisticated novels to be written by a Canadian before the Great War.

In a more general way, Sara Jeannette Duncan has undergone a rehabilitation among literary historians who recognize her importance as one of the first dedicated professional woman writers to begin their careers in Canada. But, apart from The Imperialist and a brief selection of her newspaper writings, none of her work has been reprinted, and only during the 1970s have serious critical studies of her books (other than The Imperialist) begun to appear in Canadian journals, culminating in the publication of the sole book-length study of her writings, Thomas E. Tausky's sound and comprehensive Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire (1978). So far as I have been able to discover, this recent small surge of interest in Sara Jeannette Duncan has been limited to Canada; it has not spread to Britain or the United States, where her books were most widely published and read during her lifetime, or to India, where she lived half her life and about which she wrote some of her best books.

The reasons for the neglect from which Sara Jeannette Duncan's reputation has only recently begun to emerge are closely connected with the character and even the virtues of her writing, and especially with the political vision with which her best-known works were associated. She was a remarkably good journalist in a style that became dated because its sometimes rather frenetic brilliance was a manifestation of the self-consciousness which their role in a world dominated by men imposed on young women writers seeking a career in the press (sometimes it also imposed on them masculine pretences, for there was a time when Sara Jeannette wrote under the nom de plume of 'Garth Grafton'). She was also a novelist always tempted towards the didactic, which sometimes imposes a fatal topicality. She was particularly interested in the movement for imperial federation that rose and foundered about the turn of the century and was especially associated with Joseph Chamberlain in England and with the remnants of the Canada First movement in Canada.

Though the influence of George Eliot is certainly visible in a book like The Imperia, Sara Jeannette Duncan's literary inclinations were shown already in an early article she wrote on a visit to New Orleans in 1885, when she remarked that 'literary taste is high in New Orleans. On the table in your boarding-house you will find Turgenev, Hawthorne, Arnold, James, where at home you would be greeted by such celebrities as Mary Jane Holmes, Mrs Braddon, or the Duchess' (Selected Journalism). She was to see herself always in the sophisticated company of the Turgenevs and the Jameses and outside the sentimental conventions of Victorian women's writing, though she was not lacking in her own kind of romanticism. And though her stress on realism made her sympathetic to Turgenev, it was to be largely in the United States that she found her literary models. In her generally clear-sighted way she recognized the reason for this inclination even before she took to writing books, when in 1888 she contributed a piece on 'American Influence on Canadian Thought' to Goldwin Smith's magazine, The Week.

The lack of moneyed leisure is not the only condition of life common to Americans and Canadians. If it were, American literature would be as impotent, at any price, to change the character of Canadian literature as it is to effect a literary revolution in England. But, like the Americans, we have a certain untrammelled consciousness of new conditions and their opportunities, in art as well as in society, in commerce, in government. Like them, having a brief past as a people, we concentrate the larger share of thought, energy, and purpose upon our future. We have their volatile character, as we would have had without contact with them; volatility springs in a new country as naturally as weeds. We have greatly their likings and their dislikings, their ideas and their opinions. In short, we have not escaped, as it was impossible we should escape, the superior influence of a people overwhelming in numbers, prosperous in business, and aggressive in political and social faith, the natural conditions of whose life we share, and with whom we are brought every day into closer contact. (Selected Journalism)

Appearing in the journal which Goldwin Smith, a former imperial federationist, was now using to put forward his pleas for commercial union with the United States, this passage reads more like an argument for the inevitability of American annexation than Sara Jeannette Duncan perhaps intended. For politically her loyalties always inclined towards the Empire, the British connexion, and when she did leave Canada for good it was not to emigrate to the United States, along the road taken by so many Canadian writers from Major John Richardson onward, but to find her place in one of the poles of Empire, the city of Calcutta, which before the building of New Delhi was the capital of the Viceroys of India. Yet she felt always the distinction between Britain and parts of the empire that had developed their own style of life, and an earlier piece in The Week, 'Our Latent Loyalty', set out some of the reasons why, sharing so much with the Americans, Canadians had loyalties that lay elsewhere.

Sentiment is difficult of analysis, and the sentiment of the flag of the most difficult sort. We owe more to Britain than we are ever likely to pay; gratitude may be detected in it. We love our Queen: for the span of a long lifetime she has been to us the embodiment of all the tender virtues of a woman, all the noble graces of a queen. Thousands of her subjects in Canada were born in her kingdom; and nothing is more contagious than the loyalty they colonized with. Rideau Hall is an isolated fact in our social life. It has, and can have, no translatable meaning as a centre for the very irregular circumference it should dominate. Such old-world practices as obtain there we rather rejoice to see, feeling again in their dignity the bond of connection with the most dignified of commonwealths, and in their great incongruity, assurance that they can never become indigenous. We are glad to know that Her Majesty's representative is comfortable in Ottawa, and can be made so in his own way; and for esteeming his presence there or here an honour, with the history he bids us share, the traditions he commits to our keeping, and the flag he points our love and loyalty to, we cannot think of apologizing. (Selected Journalism)

Such a passage helps to explain why, like the Canada Firsters who also embraced imperialism, Sara Jeannette Duncan rejected the idea of Canada as a colonial dependency, since she shared with them the vision of equal peoples accepting a realm of common interest based on past connexions even if by now, as she also remarked, the ancient symbols of the loyalties involved might have become 'alien to our social system'.

Her sense of the complexities inherent not only in political loyalties but also in the relations between people from different cultures (even cultures using the same language) drew Sara Jeannette Duncan especially towards William Dean Howells and Henry James, the American writers for whom she expressed the greatest admiration. It is Howells with whom she shows the nearest affinity as a writer, for whenever she seems to be emulating James's complexities of manner her prose tends to lose the lucidity and springiness that are its most attractive qualities. Like Howells, she was always a novelist of manners, so that when we read books like The Imperialist and His Honour, and a Lady, we get the same sense of the living texture of everyday life, of the average as a setting for the exceptional, as Howells evoked, while, like Howells, Duncan used her experience of travel to illuminate the worlds she knew (Canadian, English, American, Anglo-Indian) by introducing into them sensitive and perceptive travellers from other cultures.

Particularly when she was a journalist training herself to be an author, Duncan thought and wrote interestingly about the nature of literature, which she once called 'the noblest product of civilization', and particularly about the modern trends in which she felt herself involved. 'Outworn Literary Methods' was one of the articles she wrote for The Week in 1887. She touched on the 'literature of travel', in which she was already engaged as a journalist, and on fiction, upon which she intended shortly to embark. Of travel literature she remarked that the modern writer had abandoned Ruskinian descriptiveness and Baedeker-like historicism, 'and writes graphically instead of the humanity about him, its tricks of speech, its manner of breaking bread, its ideals, aims, superstitions' (Selected Journalism). On fiction she writes with a kind of halfbaked libertarianism (let us remember that she was still only 25!) which nevertheless seems to embody a recognition of what Howells and his American contemporaries meant when they proclaimed their dedication to 'fidelity to experience and probability of motive'.

To the casual observer little order or method seems to prevail in the set of circumstances taken apparently at random from anybody's experience, and cut off at both ends to suit the capacity of the cover. But in this respect appearances are deceitful. The novel of today may be written to show the culminative action of a passion, to work out an ethical problem of everyday occurrence, to give body and form to a sensation of the finest or of the coarsest kind, for almost any reason which can be shown to have a connection with the course of human life, and the development of human character. Motives of this sort are not confined to any given school or its leaders, but affect the mass of modern novel writers very generally, and inspire all whose work rises above the purpose of charming the idle hour of that bored belle in her boudoir whose taste used to be so exclusively catered to by the small people in fiction. The old rules by which any habitual novel reader could prophesy truly at the third chapter how the story would 'come out' are disregarded, the well-wcrn incidents discarded, the sine qua non audaciously done without. Fiction has become a law unto itself, and its field has broadened with the assumption. (Selected Journalism)

As a journalist, Sara Jeannette Duncan had already learnt that 'she must have some unworn incident, some fiber of novelty or current interest to give value to her work' in the eyes of editors and the reading public, and her newspaper pieces contain many vignettes that still evoke vividly how ordinary Canadians lived a hundred years or so ago. When she went into fiction it was by way of travel journalism, for her first book, A Social Departure (published in 1890), was a collection of travel dispatches written for the Montreal Star during a world journey, streamlined into a narrative and given a fictional form in which the interest is concentrated on the ways in which two young women of different backgrounds travelling together (the Canadian narrator and her archly-named English companion Orthodocia) experience their mildly exotic adventures in Japan and India and the Middle East. There is a triple movement in the book, embodied in the varying responses of the two travellers to strange settings, and the way in which they affect each other. On this level the claims of fiction are somewhat shallowly fulfilled, and a frame is provided for the bright but rarely more than superficial observations of unfamiliar societies and their strange life styles. From this pattern Sara Jeannette Duncan never entirely escaped. She always tended to be the victim of her own verbal cleverness, and to imagine that when she had brought people into amusing confrontation in settings that emphasized their peculiarities of character she had written a novel. Such charming fictions of manner and setting, which fail in her own requirement of 'the development of human character', punctuate her career.

The first of her Indian books, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893), is an early example. A young man in trade in Calcutta, and therefore without expectation of ever becoming a burra sahib, sends for his fiancee from England, they are married, set up house in Calcutta, and young Mrs Browne goes through all the exotic and often exasperating experiences of establishing a household and finding her level as a chota memsahib (little lady, as against burra memsahib, great lady) in the highly stratified Anglo-Indian society. An ironic touch is given to the narrative, since it is told by an older woman, Mrs Perth McIntyre, who had gone through the same experiences as Mrs Browne, and who watches the way in which the young woman's eager response to an unfamiliar way of life has been destroyed by the communal pressure to conformity; for the English in India, conformity was selfdefence. The novel ends on a note of quiet pathos.

It was a very little splash that submerged Mrs Browne in Anglo-India, and there is no longer a ripple to tell about it. I don't know that life has contracted much for her. I doubt if it was ever intended to hold more than young Browne and the baby—but it has changed. Affairs that are not young Browne's or the baby's touch her very little. Her world is the personal world of AngloIndia, and outside of it, except in affection for Canbury, I believe she does not think at all. She is growing dull in India, too, which is about as sad a thing as any. She sees no more the supple savagery of the Pathan in the market-place, the bowed reverence of the Mussulman praying in the sunset, the early morning mists lifting among the domes and palms of the city. She has acquired for the Aryan inhabitant a certain strong irritation, and she believes him to be nasty in all his ways. This will sum up her impressions of India as completely years hence as it does today. She is a memsahib like another.… I hope she may not stay twenty-two years. Anglo-Indian tissues, material and spiritual, are apt to turn in twenty-two years to a substance somewhat resembling chalk. And I hope she will not remember so many dead faces as I do when she goes away—dead faces and palm fronds grey with the powder of the wayside, and clamorous voices of the bazar crying, 'Here iz! memsahib! Here iz!'… So let us go our several ways. This is a dusty world. We drop down the river with the tide to-night. We shall not see the red tulip blossoms of the silk cottons fall again.

The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib carries the process of fictionalization a step farther than A Social Departure. It is no longer through the eyes of two real people turned into characters, but through those of invented characters, that we are looking at and otherwise experiencing a strange world, but still the author is mainly engaged in writing graphically of the humanity about her, 'its tricks of speech, its manner of breaking bread, its ideals, aims, superstitions'. And we can reasonably take it that The Simple Adventures is Sara Jeannette Duncan's way of telling us something of how she adjusted to a strange life when in 1891 she went out to marry Everard Charles Cotes, the curator of the Indian Museum who shortly afterwards went into journalism and became the editor of the Indian Daily News. Certainly neither of the Brownes emerges as a strongly delineated personality, and (except for a visiting and meddling British politician portrayed with acerbic dislike) the remaining characters are all shallow types of Anglo-India rather than people with interesting inner lives. Nor, indeed, do we have much access to the inner life even of Mrs Browne, the central figure of the novel, and this is not entirely because her experiences are told from the outside, by the observant Mrs Perth McIntyre. It is because she is so neutral as a person, so much the experiencing membrane, that she never takes on shape in our minds as a woman whose feelings are deep and real or whose relation to her world is much more than an excuse for the author to record her own impressions of India and its English expatriate community as she first saw them.

This temptation to present a world in which the manners are more important than the men and women who practise them trapped Sara Duncan recurrently into writing bright and insubstantial novels of the same kind as The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, which introduce an unfamiliar society to those who do not know it, and give its inhabitants a new view of themselves, by using observant, experiencing stranger's as principal characters. We are still surprisingly near to A Social Departure and the boundary where journalism merges into fiction even in some of the novels of Sara Jeannette Duncan's mature period, such as Those Delightful Americans, published in 1902 (nine years after The Simple Adventures). A young Englishman and his wife (the narrator) go to New York to settle some business affairs affecting his family, and are offered splendid hospitality by an American lawyer involved in the corporation the Englishman is visiting. They are passed on to the household of one of the bigger financial magnates, a man who has risen from poverty and still retains many of the simplicities of his former existence. The life of the American leisured classes, their business methods, their eating practices and their courting habits, and especially the characteristics of the American Girl, are entertainingly and informatively displayed. The visitors' business is safely concluded, and the rather placidlyflowing plot is given what little complication it assumes by two American courtships which take on a twist more worthy of a West End comedy than a serious novel, when the couples shuffle themselves at the end of the novel and the American Girls, in their magnificent independence, pick the men neither the narrator nor the readers had expected them to choose.

The preoccupations of the novelist who wrote Those Delightful Americans were in many ways similar to those of the young journalist who had written perceptively and wittily of the Creole belles of New Orleans in the 1880s. One of Sara Duncan's most persistent literary personae was the sophisticated essayist who from the beginning had moved on the frontiers of fiction, spicing her facts with fancy when she was producing reportage, and stuffing her fiction with faits divers when she was writing her lighter novels. This inclination she shared with many Canadian novelists who have also been remarkably good essayists and whose fiction has retained not only the elegance and informativeness of the essay but also its tendency towards the opinionated and the didactic. Stephen Leacock, Hugh MacLennan, Robertson Davies, and Hugh Hood are representative examples of the Canadian writers who have not ceased to be essayists by turning to fiction; Sara Jeannette Duncan was their ancestress.

For even when she did move into more substantial fiction, into novels where the characters were well developed and the action became tense with conflict, it was under the influence of the didactic impulse of politics. At her best, in The Imperialist or in her more impressive works on India, like His Honour, and a Lady and especially The Burnt Offering, Sara Duncan became one of the few Canadians who have written genuine political fiction to which, as Thomas E. Tausky has pointed out, Irving Howe's classic definition [in Politics and the Novel, 1957] clearly applies when he differentiates the political from the social novel, defining it as 'the kind in which the idea of society, as distinct from the mere unquestioned workings of society, has penetrated the consciousnesses of the characters in all of its profoundly problematic aspects, so that there is to be observed in their behaviour, and they are themselves often aware of, some coherent political loyalty or ideological identification'.

Early in her career as a journalist Sara Duncan wanted to become involved in political writing, and in March 1888 she gained her first opportunity when she was appointed parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa for the Montreal Star. It was a brief assignment, for in the last summer she was already in Brantford preparing for her departure in September on the world tour that led to her first book, A Social Departure. The columns she wrote suggest that she was more interested in the pageant and the personalities of Canadian government than in the issues at stake during the brief session she reported, for her dispatches are strong on description of parliamentary events and weak in analysis of policies, which may well explain why the Star was so happy to send her on the world tour where her descriptive powers would be more appropriately used.

However, her interest in politics remained, and was put to journalistic use when she began in the middle 1890s to write editorials for the Indian Daily News. It surfaced in the first Indian novel, The Simple Adventures of a Memsabib, where she introduced, in the person of Jonas Batcham M.P., her first sketch of the gullible travelling politician who visits India and acquires a superficial knowledge of the situation there which leads him to make misleading accusations regarding the administration of the local officials. On a very simple level, the attitude towards the Raj that Sara Duncan maintained in the thirty years of her connexion with India was already established in this early book. She looked with a satiric eye on the social pretensions and the snobbish distinctions within the Calcutta Anglo-Indian community. She disliked the Bengali 'baboos' who had received a partial education in the English manner and belonged to neither the new western nor the traditional Indian culture. She looked on Indian princes as material for comedy, and when she did portray an Indian character convincingly and in depth he usually turned out to be something of a villain. An example is the Indian nationalist, Ganendra Thakore, in The Burnt Offering, who was based on an actual nationalist leader, Bal Gandhadur Tilak, a pious Hindu advocate of the use of extreme and violent means to rid India of British domination. Sara Duncan had clearly studied Tilak's record and his character very carefully, for Ganedra Thakore is a thoroughly believable Indian leader of the Tilak kind without being a literal portrait; he is also diabolically convincing in his pietistic evil. Almost everything that Sara Duncan wrote of India spoke well of those Anglo-Indian idealists who saw themselves taking up the White Man's Burden and offering the Indians, despite their ungrateful opposition, the way to a more healthy and industrious life by which, in the long rather than the short run, they would be prepared to take their places within the Empire as equals. Sara Duncan's Indian politics were nearer to those of Lord Curzon than to those of the regular Indian establishment, and this means, of course, that they were more consciously Imperialist in the ideal sense than most India hands allowed themselves to be in practice.

His Honour, and a Lady (1896), published three years after The Simple Adventures of a Memsib, shows a considerable advance in Sara Duncan's understanding of the moral ambience of the Raj. Reading this and her other Indian novels we have to remember the special position, almost ideal for ironic observation, which she held in AngloIndian society. As wife of the curator of the Indian Museum she did not belong to the commercial strata of AngloIndian society, yet her husband was not one of the allpowerful members of the Indian Civil Service. Leaving the museum to become a newspaper editor, he (and Sara) remained somewhere between the commercials and the civilians, so that they never became burra sahibs yet had fairly free access to almost every Indian presence, whether in Calcutta or in the hot-weather capital of Simla. This mobility, combined with the special access to political issues conferred by her newspaper work, allowed Sara Duncan to write with irony on Anglo-Indian social relationships at the same time as she seriously considered the political issues that faced the rulers of India and the moral struggles out of which their decisions and their subsequent actions arose.

His Honour, and a Lady shows admirably the dual aspects of Duncan's Indian novels. The title is more weightily ambiguous than most critics have realized. To begin, it refers to one of the leading figures, John Church, who as the novel opens is receiving the news that he has been picked out from his remote District Commissionership to become acting Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal; he will be referred to as His Honour. By the time the book ends, Church has lost his post in a political storm and has died of cholera, and his secret enemy Lewis Ancram has been appointed Lieutenant Governor and become His Honour. The Lady with whom both their Honours are involved is Church's wife Judith, who married him, a man more than twice her age, because it meant an escape from spinsterhood in a grey English industrial town to the romantic possibilities of life in India. Judith does not love John, but she immensely respects his devotion and his idealism, and when she falls in love with Ancram, and he with her, she cannot sacrifice her marriage. Partly, we see, she is moved by fear of the unknown, of the consequences in the Victorian world of adultery or (even worse) of divorce, but she is also influenced by her deep loyalty to the man whose struggle to use his power for the good of Indians she entirely admires.

Church's great plan, on which he risks his position and his reputation, is to change education in Bengal, superseding Macaulay's system of English liberal-style education (which by the end of the nineteenth century had produced a host of unemployable and discontented graduates in arts and law), with a system more orientated towards technical training, which would benefit the sons of peasants rather than the sons of landowners and moneylenders educated under the existing system. Ancram, who is Chief Secretary to the Bengal Government, pretends to admire Church and to support his proposal, but in fact despises him as a politician and intrigues with Bengali nationalists who seize on the educational issue to fan opposition to the regime; Ancram is the real author of the article in a Bengal paper which has most influence in Britain, forcing the Secretary of State to demand Church's resignation. Fortuitously (perhaps too fortuitously) Church is already sick from the cholera of which he is to die when the news is communicated to him by the Viceroy.

What makes Ancram interesting as a character is the division between his love for Judith Church and his hatred for John Church. His lack of true passion is shown by the fact that he does not hate Church emotionally as a rival in Judith's love, but intellectually as an administrator whose reforms, whatever their merits, are not in accordance with what he regards as the experience of imperial rule. Nevertheless, when Church dies, Ancram hopes he will not only gain his position as Lieutenant Governor but also win his wife. But Judith learns at the last minute how Ancram betrayed Church with his anonymous article, and she declines to marry him. And here the title takes on one of its secondary meanings. For this 'Lady' there is only one 'His Honour'; Ancram's title is shown to be specious as we realize that Sara Duncan is writing not merely about the honorific aspects of office, but also about the honour involved in political morality. John Church is an honourable man because he carries out, to the point of risking and accepting death, the obligations of his office, and refuses to bow to political expediencies when he is devising a new system which he believes will be to the ultimate benefit of the people he rules as a surrogate monarch. Ancram is a man without honour, since he allows expediency to make him an ally of those who are seeking to frustrate, by their specious visions of independence, the positive efforts of the British rulers.

This battle of political ideals and personal honour take place against the background of an expatriate society projected partly through the eyes of the narrator and partly through the shrewd observation of the second important woman in the novel, Rhoda Daye, an independent-minded young person with a witty tongue who is engaged to Ancram but jilts him because she recognizes his hollowness; there is a great deal in Rhoda, one feels, of her creator. In portraying the meretricious Anglo-Indian social life Sara Duncan's talents as a novelist of manners are well deployed, and the 'composite dinner party' given by Mrs Daye, Rhoda's mother and the wife of a Commisariat Colonel, shows admirably how she could balance sharp dialogue and analytical narrative.

Mrs Daye always gave composite dinner parties, and this was one of them. 'If you ask nobody but military people to meet each other', she was in the habit of saying, 'you hear nothing but the price of chargers and the prospects of the Staff Corps. If you make your list up of civilians, the conversation consists of abuse of their official superiors and the infamous conduct of the Secretary of State about the rupee'. On this occasion Mrs Daye had reason to anticipate that the price of chargers would be varied by the grievances of the Civil Service, and that a touring Member of Parliament would participate in the discussion who knew nothing about either; and she felt that her blend would be successful. She could give herself up to the somewhat fearful enjoyment she experienced in Mr Ancram's society. Mrs Daye was convinced that nobody appreciated Mr Ancram more subtly than she did. She saw a great deal of jealousy of him in Calcutta society, whereas she was wont to declare that, for her part, she found nothing extraordinary in the way he had got in—a man of his brains, you know! And if Calcutta resented this imputation upon its brains in ever so slight a degree, Mrs Daye saw therein more jealousy of the fact that her family circle was about to receive him. When it had once opened for that purpose and closed again, Mrs Daye hoped vaguely that she would be sustained in the new and exacting duty of living up to Mr Ancram.

'Please look at Rhoda', she begged, in a conversational buzz that her blend had induced.

Mr Ancram looked, deliberately, but with appreciation. 'She seems to be sufficiently entertained', he said.

'Oh, she is! She's got a globe-trotter. Haven't you found out that Rhoda simply loves globetrotters? She declares that she renews her youth in them.'

'Her first impressions, I suppose she means?'

'Oh, as to what she means—'

Mrs Daye broke off irresolutely, and thoughtfully conveyed a minute piece of roll to her lips. The minute piece of roll was Mr Ancram's opportunity to complete Mrs Daye's suggestion of a certain interesting ambiguity in her daughter, but he did not take it. He continued to look attentively at Miss Daye, who appeared, as he said, to be sufficiently entertained, under circumstances that seemed to him inadequate. Her traveller was talking emphatically, with gestures of elderly dogmatism, and she was deferentially listening, an amusement behind her eyes with which the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal was not altogether unfamiliar. He had seen it there before, on occasions when there was apparently nothing to explain it.

'It would be satisfactory to see her eating her dinner', he remarked, with what Mrs Daye felt to be too slight a degree of solicitude. She was obliged to remind herself that at thirty-seven a man was apt to take these things more as matters of fact, especially—and there was a double comfort in this reflection—a man already well up in the Secretariat and known to be ambitious. 'Is it possible', Mr Ancram went on, somewhat absently, 'that these are Calcutta roses? You must have a very clever gardener.'

'No'—and Mrs Daye pitched her voice with a gentle definiteness that made what she was saying interesting all round the table—'they came from the Viceroy's place at Barrackpore. Lady Emily sent them to me: so sweet of her, I thought! I always think it particularly kind when people in that position trouble themselves about one; they must have so many demands upon their time.'

The effect could not have been better. Everybody looked at the roses with an interest that might have been described as respectful; and Mrs Delaine, whose husband was Captain Delaine of the Durham Rifles, said that she would have known them for Their Excellencies' roses anywhere—they always did not table with that kind for the Thursday dinners at Government House—she had never known them to use any other.

Mrs St George, whose husband was the Presidency Magistrate, found this interesting. 'Do they really?' she exclaimed. 'I've often wondered what those big Thursday affairs were like. Fancy—we've been in Calcutta through three cold weathers now, and have never been asked to anything but little private dinners at Government House—not more than eight or ten, you know!'

'Don't you prefer that?' asked Mrs Delaine, taking her quenching with noble equanimity.

Sara Jeannette Duncan did not become so preoccupied with Anglo-Indian society or with the politics of the Raj that she easily forgot her Canadian Links, and in an article ('Imperial Sentiment in Canada') published in the Indian Daily News in the same year as His Honour, and a Lady appeared she sketched a theme that eight years later would be fictionally fleshed out in her only completely Canadian novel, The Imperialist. In this piece she made clear that her own sympathies were with Joseph Chamberlain and his idea of a 'practical Federation of the British Empire based on a mutual system of preferential tariffs': an idea that would be kept alive into the 1930s by a Canadian expatriate politician operating from Britain, Lord Beaverbrook. Sara Duncan castigated Sir John Macdonald for paying lip service to Canada's British links, while his National Policy 'was conceived and carried out in plain opposition to British interest as a whole, and many of its tariff provisions were directly aimed at British manufactures'. And she was encouraged by a statement of the newly elected Liberal Premier, Laurier, that 'he and his Liberals looked with favour upon designs for Imperial Federation based on a preferential tariff for the goods of British Columbia and her colonies'. She was gratified that Joseph Chamberlain 'should find the first sincere welcome to his scheme for Imperial Federation offered by the Liberals of Canada, with whose economic principles it accords, and who are proud to claim a part in the greatness it prefigures' (Selected Journalism). Sara Duncan was expecting too much from Laurier, for Canada at no time committed herself to the cause of Imperial Federation. Eight years later, in The Imperialist, she used this Liberal betrayal, as it seemed to her, for her basic situation.

The Imperialist is not, any more than the other novels by Sara Duncan that I am discussing, entirely a political novel. The aborting of Lorne Murchison's parliamentary career through the conflict between ideals and practical politics in the Ontario town of Elgin is only one of the novel's leading strains, and though the fiasco of young Murchinson's election campaign provides the most visibly dramatic action, his sister Advena's finally-successful efforts to achieve a marriage of true minds with the preacher, Hugh Finlay, is almost as important in balancing the structure and heightening the emotional tension of the novel. The contrast between the intellectual Advena's steadfastness in love and the fickleness of the shallow-minded Dora Milburn, who jilts Lorne for a visiting English snob, parallels the contrast between Lorne's stead-fastness to his imperial ideal once he had adopted it and the calculating expediency of the Liberal-party hacks who veer immediately they see the vote endangered by idealist politics and who eventually desert Lorne when a reelectrion is ordered and they feel they need a more cynical candidate.

The Imperialist is as much a social as a political novel, and a great deal of its lasting appeal in Canada lies in the nostalgic vividness with which Sara Duncan recreates, in the small town of Elgin, the Brantford in which she spent her childhood and her youth. A great deal of the local colour that she shared with Howells enters the passages of urban description in which she sets the scene for her political drama. It is there with a special felicity in the opening passage of the book where the bizarre figure of the half-mad gingerbread-seller, 'old Mother Beggarlegs', introduces the celebration in loyal Elgin of the Queen's Birthday, and it appears in a more solid way, giving a sense of the devotion of Elgin people to the immediate advantages of life, in the passage describing the market square where Lorne's legal office is situated.

During four days in the week the market square was empty. Odds and ends of straw and paper blew about it; an occasional pedestrian crossed it diagonally for the short cut to the post-office; the town hall rose in the middle, and defied you to take your mind off the ugliness of municipal institutions. On the other days it was a scene of activity. Farmers' wagons, with the shafts turned in, were ranged round three sides of it; on a big day they would form into parallel lines and cut the square into sections as well. The produce of all Fox County filled the wagons, varying agreeably as the year went round. Bags of potatoes leaned against the sidewalk, apples brimmed in bushel measures, ducks dropped their twisted necks over the cart wheels; the town hall, in this play of colour, stood redeemed. The produce was mostly left to the women to sell. On the fourth side of the square loads of hay and cordwood demanded the master mind, but small matter of fruit, vegetables, and poultry submitted to feminine judgment. The men 'unhitched', and went away on their own business; it was the wives you accosted as they sat in the middle, with their knees drawn up and their skirts tucked close, vigilant in rusty bonnets, if you wished to buy. Among them circulated the housewives of Elgin, pricing and comparing, and acquiring; you could see it all from Dr Simmons's window, sitting in his chair that screwed up and down. There was a little difficulty always about getting things home; only very ordinary people carried their own marketing. Trifling articles, like eggs or radishes, might be smuggled into a brown wicker basket with covers, but it did not consort with elegance to 'trapes' home with anything that looked inconvenient or had legs sticking out of it. So that arrangements of mutual obligation had to be made: the good woman from whom Mrs Jones had bought her tomatoes would take charge of the spring chickens Mrs Jones had bought from another good woman just as soon as not, and deliver them to Mrs Jones's residence, as under any circumstances she was 'going round that way'.

This is not mere stage scenery, for the mixture of formality and calculation shown in the market behaviour of Elgin housewives is extended into the whole of the little town's society as it is laid out before us, dominated by the materialism of its factory interests yet led also by more tenuous considerations of class and convention that derive from a history different from that of the Americans. It is of course the tendency for material self-interest to compete with wider and more nebulous loyalties that Lorne Murchison has to fight in his effort to win election on the basis of a policy that, by dismantling Sir John Macdonald's tariff barriers to let British manufactures in, might harm the profits of Elgin factory-owners and the wages of Elgin workers. The full bitterness of Lorne's situation emerges when we realize that it is material self-interest on the lowest level, the eagerness of a few men to earn bribes which the political 'boys' offer them, that puts Lorne's marginal electoral victory in jeopardy. And this leads to the situation in which the rival political machines agree to a 'saw-off' that will halt investigations of corruption on both sides provided the judges order a new election. It is when the party bosses send for him that Lorne finally understands how ideals are used in practical politics, being adopted and discarded as expediency dictates.

They had delegated what Horace Williams called 'the job' to Mr Farquharson, and he was actually struggling with the preliminaries of it, when Bingham, uncomfortable under the curious quietude of the young fellow's attention, burst out with the whole thing.

'The fact is, Murchison, you can't poll the vote. There's no man in the Riding we'd be better pleased to send to the House; but we've got to win this election, and we can't win it with you.'

'You think you can't?' said Lorne.

'You see, old man', Horace Williams put in, 'you didn't get rid of that save-the-Empire-or-die scheme of yours soon enough. People got to think you meant something by it.'

'I shall never get rid of it', Lorne returned simply, and the others looked at one another.

'The popular idea seems to be', said Mr Farquharson judicially, 'that you would not hesitate to put Canada to some material loss, or at least to postpone her development in various important directions, for the sake of the imperial connection.'

'Wasn't that', Lorne asked him, 'what, six months ago, you were all prepared to do?'

'Oh, no', said Bingham, with the air of repudiating for everybody concerned. 'Not for a cent. We were willing at one time to work it for what it was worth, but it never was worth all that, and if you'd had a little more experience, Murchison, you'd have realized it'.

'That's right, Lorne', contributed Horace Williams. 'Experience—that's all you want. You've got everything else, and a darned sight more. We'll get you there, all in good time. But this time—'

'You want me to step down and out', said Lorne.

And after a little more conversation he agrees, and leaves the other men, 'and they stood together in a moment's silence, three practical politicians who had delivered themselves from a dangerous network involving higher things'.

One ends The Imperialist with more than a suspicion that Sara Duncan is sceptical of the ability of democratic politics ever to rise above the level of expediency and self-interest, and this attitude is developed further in the second political novel about India which I am here discussing, The Burnt Offering. If His Honour, and a Lady is about how practical politics destroys honour, and The Imperialist is about how it erodes ideals, The Burnt Offering is really about how ideals applied without sufficient knowledge of a situation can be as destructive as the most cynical of manipulative policies; in fact mistaken ideals and political manipulation, in Sara Duncan's view, seem to work together and feed each other.

The Burnt Offering draws its life from the political ferment that arose when India was released in 1905 from the glacial bureaucratic peace of Lord Curzon's viceroyalty. In 1906 a Liberal government came to power in Westminster, intent on introducing reforms that would hasten India on the road towards constitutional government. The Anglo-Indian community, led by the Viceroy, Lord Minto, was sceptical of the practicality of John Morley's reforms, which in the Indian Councils Act of 1909 introduced the elective principle into the selection of legislative councils; justification seemed to be given to this caution by the fact that between 1907 and 1910 the Bengali and Mahratta terrorists became powerful in the Indian independence movement and, under Bal Ganghadur Tilak, challenged the moderates led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Gandhi's predecessor. Tilak was imprisoned for sedition in 1908, and a rash of terrorist attempts followed, including one on Minto's life. The British replied by restricting freedom of speech, press, and meeting and by other stringent emergency measures.

Sara Duncan was in India throughout this turbulent period, and recognized the opportunities it offered for a powerful political novel. The Burnt Offering, which appeared in 1909, while the terrorist campaign was in progress and the British were buttressing their regime by strong police action, was therefore extremely topical, and its very topicality in 1909 is one of the reasons why it is historically so interesting in the 1980s. It gives a vivid sense of the ambience in which both the English and the educated Indians lived in Calcutta, which was still the capital of India as well as of Bengal, and if Sara Duncan has taken the liberties with the actual pattern of events that fiction demands she still evokes, both vividly and authentically, the political forces then at work in India.

Indian characters are more numerous in The Burnt Offering than in any of Sara Duncan's earlier novels, and their variety suggests how closely she had observed the types with which an enquiring Anglo-Indian was likely to come into contact. The common people other than servants (coolies, policemen, peasants, cabbies) are seen from the outside, portrayed as a genre painter might do, with a quick stroke that sets them in the mind's eye: 'Lower down a steamer had been coaling, and along the footpath on the riverside trooped some scores of blackened coolies, each in his rag of loin-cloth, chattering and gesticulating as they pressed on to the shelter and the meal that stood for their share of life.' The coolies are seen not without compassion, but with no sense of how, given the nature of Indian life, their lot can be changed.

The change in Indians who have been in contact with Europeans are evident. Ganendra Thakore longs to return to the old ways of Brahminical India, but to that end willingly condones forms of violence that require weapons and explosives imported from Britain and in one instance disguised as Brand's Essence, which as an extract of beef is of course repugnant to all good Hindus. In the case of Bepin Behair Dey, the young son of a family belonging to the reformed sect of Brahmo Samaj, his education in Oxford, London, and Paris had turned him into a nationalist extremist willing to sacrifice himself in an act of terrorism. Sir Kristodas Mukerji, the pious Brahmin judge, is torn between his lawyer's sense of the fairness of British administration and his traditionalist's longing that, fair or not, the rule of the aliens shall come to an end.

It is Sir Kristodas who sentences Thakore for sedition (he gives him ten years while Tilak got only six), and then resigns his judgeship and his Order of the Indian Empire to become a pilgrim wandering through the sacred places of India with his daughter, the Rani Janaki, who has eaten of western culture and found it a dusty Dead Sea Fruit, and the Swami Yadava, who combines the role of a sanyasin with that of a spy for the British police. Yadava is the least authentic of all the characters who populate the book, whether Indian or British, and this is perhaps because he is so obviously derived from the Tibetan lama who played a similar double role in Kipling's Kim, while the other Indian characters are clearly related to, though not directly modelled on, the real Indians whom Sara Duncan encountered either socially or as a journalist.

The catalytic figures in the novel are the two English people who come from outside the Anglo-Indian world: Vulcan Mills and his daughter Joan. Vulcan Mills is the most developed example of one of Sara Duncan's recurrent types, the globe-trotting British M.P. who is sketched out in the unpleasant Jonas Batcham, M.P. of The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib and appears fleetingly as a boring dinner guest in His Honour, and a Lady. For Vulcan Mills, Sara Duncan took as her model the Scottish labour leader, Keir Hardie, who made a trip to India in 1907, travelled around with open eye, and in his book, India: Impressions and Suggestions, was predictably critical of British methods, which he regarded as authoritarian but unstatesmanlike. A little sympathy and conciliation, he felt, would achieve more than a great deal of oppression, and he believed that the extension of the Indian participation in governmental affairs should be carried on with a view to eventual Dominion status. His book was moderate, sensible, and perceptive, and it was obvious that Hardie was nobody's fool.

Vulcan Mills, on the other hand, is represented as pompous, vain, and easily misled, and his daughter Joan as an ecstatic enthusiast of the most gullible kind. Such figures Sara Duncan evidently felt necessary to stress the central message of her book; that India's problems must be solved by those who know the country and have brought it forward into the nineteenth century, and that benevolent intruders from outside who do not realize the complexity of the situation are likely to play into the hands of forces which, under the cloak of patriotism, will turn India back towards its dark ages. Ganendra Thakore feeds Vulcan's sense of the total injustice of the Raj, and flatters him with suggestions of how his influence in Britain may change the situation. But Vulcan in his turn challenges Thakore to greater extremities, and eggs him on to make the speech that will lead to his imprisonment. The imprisonment in turn provokes Thakore to give the secret sign that will trigger Dey's self-destructive attempt on the Viceroy's life, so that Mills, who sees himself as a man of peace, unknowingly precipitates a sequence of deadly violence.

In The Burnt Offering the moderate Congress adherents of G. K. Gokhale never appear. Doubtless this was because Calcutta, where Sara Duncan lived, was the centre of terrorist action at the time she was writing the novel. At the same time the stress on Thakore and his fellow conspirators makes for a more dramatic book than the intrusion of moderate nationalism would have allowed, and if Sara Duncan disturbs political actuality by this choice she also enhances the fictional intensity, as Conrad did in his departure from the true history of anarchism in The Secret Agent, which Sara Duncan may well have read, since it appeared in 1907 and she had already expressed her admiration for Conrad's work in a review of An Outcast of the Islands which she wrote in 1896.

Thus the internal dynamics of the novel led Sara Duncan to make Vulcan Mills very different from Keir Hardie in real life, just as they led her to violate the sentimental conventions of her time by showing how love as well as idealism are mangled by political realities, so that there is no neat pattern of happy amorous conclusions, as in Those Delightful Americans. The lovers, each in his or her own way, are destroyed by the situation in which they are trapped. John Game, a high official, falls in love with Joan Mills, which means the disappointment and eventual withdrawal from the world of the Rani Janaki, who loves him. Joan, however, falls for the blandishments of Dey, and agrees to marry him (which Thakore thinks will be a great gain for the nationalist cause), but before their wedding can take place he has shot himself after his failed assassination attempt. The only victim of the attempt, apart from a pariah dog, is John Game, who is thrown from the Viceroy's carriage and dies, not from the explosion, but agonizingly from tetanus; Calcutta mud has got into his blood through his grazed skin. And Joan, who thinks to serve Dey's memory by remaining in India and working for the cause, is forced to leave by his female relatives, whom events have scared back into conservatism, and who no longer want the daughter of Vulcan Mills among them.

The Burnt Offering shows a far deeper understanding of the undercurrents of Indian life than Sara Duncan's first book on the country, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, and it is more sophisticated and more critical in its portrayal of Anglo-Indian society than His Honour, and a Lady. Duncan's awareness of the divisions between political ideals and political realities is as certain as it was in The Imperialist, which in my view rivals The Burnt Offering as her best novel. And if, in the end, I consider The Burnt Offering the better, if not the more plausible book, it is because Sara Duncan has not been afraid to shake off verisimilitude when she found it necessary to give dramatic or grotesque form to the shape of political violence, whether in the mind or in the streets. She showed her understanding of Stendhal's maxim: 'Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's attention.'