SOURCE: "Sara Jeannette Duncan as a Novelist," in Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire, P. D. Meany Publishers, 1980, pp. 73-90.

[Sara Jeannette Duncan] began reviewing fiction at a time when the controversy between the proponents of realism and of romance was at its height. Her own attitude … was to avoid what she took to be extreme positions on either side. It is not surprising to discover, therefore, that elements of realism and romance co-exist, sometimes happily, sometimes uneasily, in her novels.

Realists, a distinguished critic [M. H. Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, 1957] has said, choose to write about "people without exceptional endowments, who live through ordinary experiences of childhood, adolescence, love, marriage, parenthood and infidelity." Sara herself scornfully referred to such subjects as "cabbages, vegetable or human," but seventeen years later we find her making literary produce of the Elgin market:

Bags of potatoes leaned against the sidewalk, apples brimmed in bushel measures, ducks dropped their twisted necks over the cart wheels.… On the fourth side of the square loads of hay and cordwood demanded the master mind, but small matters of fruits, 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.… There was a little difficulty always about getting things home; only very ordinary people carried their own marketing … it did not consort with elegance to "traipse" home with anything that looked inconvenient or had legs sticking out of it.

In its careful observation of undramatic life, the passage is a fine example of pure realism. Yet in the same novel, one can easily find a passage saturated with romance conventions:

He bent his head and lowered his umbrella and lost sight of her as they approached, she with the storm behind her, driven with hardly more resistance than the last year's blackened leaves that blew with her, he assailed by it and making the best way he could. Certainly the wind was taking her part and his, when in another moment her skirt whipped against him and he saw her face glimmer out. A mere wreck of lines and shadows it seemed in the livid light, with suddenly perceiving eyes and lips that cried his name.… Pitifully, the storm blew her into his arms, a tossed and straying thing that could not speak for sobs; pitifully and with a rough incoherent sound he gathered and held her in that refuge.

Though these storm-crossed lovers (Hugh Finaly and Advena Murchison) are elsewhere described in less exalted terms, here they are forced to play heroic melodrama, while Nature is conscripted to act a moody supporting part. Romance is, of course, a respectable fictional form with a much longer history than realism, but in Sara Jeannette Duncan's hands the sentiments are cloying and the rhetoric over-blown. She is generally at her best as a realist writer and at her worst as a writer of romance. There are many passages of realism throughout her fiction as good as the ones I have quoted, and many equally embarrassing passages of romance.

There are two characteristic kinds of romance in Sara Jeannette Duncan's work: delight in the charms of the English aristocracy or the American rich; and scenes of anguished and passionate, but inarticulate, love. A definition relevant to Sara's brand of realism is found in an American critic's account of the novel of manners [James W. Tuttleton, in The Novel of Manner in America, 1972]:

We may define a novel of manners as a novel in which the closeness of manners and character is of itself interesting enough to justify an examination of their relationship. By a novel of manners I mean a novel in which the manners, social customs, folkways, conventions, traditions and mores of a given social group at a given time and place play a dominant role in the lives of fictional characters, exert control over their thought and behavior, and constitute a determinant upon the actions in which they are engaged, and in which these manners and customs are detailed realistically—with, in fact, a premium upon the exactness of their representation.

These characteristics are evident in Sara Jeannette Duncan's account of the Elgin market. In the passage already quoted, the market scene is certainly described accurately and minutely. Miss Duncan then goes on to analyze the "closeness of manners and character" evident in the market ritual. Generations of sober frugality had produced a distinctive regional character:

It was a scene of activity but not of excitement, or in any sense of joy … Life on an Elgin market day was a serious presentment even when the sun shone.. It was not misery, it was even a difficult kind of prosperity, but the margin was small and the struggle plain. Plain too, it was that here was no enterprise of yesterday, no fresh broken ground of dramatic promise, but a narrow inheritance of the opportunity to live which generations had grasped before. There were bones in the village grave-yards of Fox County to father all these sharp features; Elgin market square, indeed, was the biography of Fox County, and, in little, the history of the whole Province.…

A novelist interested in the influence of manners upon character is more likely to be a literary sociologist than a psychologist. Some writers are both, or move from one interest to the other; Sara Jeannette Duncan's best work, however, is achieved when she confines herself to the novel of manners. Her understanding of human nature is impressive when she is concerned with social roles: Anglo-Indian bureaucrats, small-town Canadian politicians and English country gentry are all convincing when called upon to express the attitudes and emotions that the environmental influences shaping their characters dictate. They acquire a sudden awkwardness when Sara tries to look deeper into their souls, into the more individual recesses untouched by social forces.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that he wanted "to recapture the exact feel of a moment in time and space." The best passages in Sara Jeannette Duncan's work, the passages that mark her as a clever observer of manners, realize that ambition. For example, the reader is made to understand the pretentiousness of a prominent Elgin family, and to sympathize with the discomfiture of their first guest:

No one would have supposed, from the way the family disposed itself in the drawing room, that Miss Filkin had only just finished making the claret cup, or that Dora had been cutting sandwiches till the last minute.… It was impossible to imagine a group more disengaged from the absurd fuss that precedes a party among some classes of people; indeed, when Mr. Lorne Murchison arrived… they looked almost surprised to see him.…

To be the very first and solitary arrival is nowhere esteemed the happiest fortune, but in Elgin a kind of ridiculous humiliation attached to it, a greed for the entertainment, a painful unsophistication. A young man of Elgin would walk up and down in the snow for a quarter of an hour with the thermometer at zero to escape the ignominy of it; Lorne Murchison would have so walked.

Even more impressive is the account of one-upsmanship at a Calcutta dinner party when the Viceroy is mentioned. One of the guests inquires about the roses on the table:

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 almost be 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 the 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!"

The two passages I have just quoted have in common the fact that they satirize various forms of snobbery. Hostility to snobbery is not a fixed value in Sara Jeannette Duncan's fiction, however, for the simple reason that Sara herself was a terrible snob. Indians (North American and Asian), working class people, servants, tradesmen, and even nouveaux riches and impoverished Italian aristocrats are constantly dismissed or patronized in her work because of their inferior social status. Sara's real objection to the Milburn family and to the Daye dinner guests is not that they are snobs, but that they are very stupid snobs without any distinction of their own. Their stupidity manifests itself in an inability to engage in, or even imagine, any departure from strictly conventional behaviour. The background of Miss Duncan's novels is always filled with such characters, and they seem to dominate the societies under scrutiny.

A characteristic Sara Jeannette Duncan plot seems to involve an effort on the part of imaginative, unconventional characters to realize their talents or desires in the face of pressures exerted by the conformists. In Miss Duncan's first three books, the struggle is uncomplicated and results in a clear victory for the adventurous heroines. They are obviously justified in their decisions to go round the world (A Social Departure), or to bring American informality to England (An American Girl in London) or to go on an unchaperoned barge trip (Two Girls on a Bage). Young women of sound moral character should be absolutely free to pursue their decorous inclinations. Sara's confidence in her principle gives these books much of their spirit and charm, though the principle itself is hardly profound.

But what if a young girl's efforts at self-realization lead her to more dubious moral realms? Elfrida Bell, the heroine of Sara's first serious novel, decides that to become an artist she must go to the Latin Quarter of Paris, and we all know what those bohemians are like. In actual fact, Sara does not seem to know, but she hints darkly, and eventually Elfrida's quest ends in suicide. A later heroine is an actress in a seedy Calcutta company; she gains more of her creator's sympathy, but there are also occasional hints of moral disapproval. Both of these characters, as well as Sara Jeannette Duncan's other heroines, are presented largely in terms of their relationship to society, rather than in terms of deeply examined personal sensibilities. They react against the norms of society, but their rebellion is presented as the adoption of an alternative set of "manners," and involves an acute awareness of the norms they have chosen to abandon.

Sara Jeannette Duncan's heroines are not all artists; some are just intelligent and/or sensitive women who want more out of a life than a conventional marriage with a conventional, bureaucratic bore. They are frequently put in the position of being tempted by opportunities for extramarital affairs. Sara does not, however, allow her characters to go beyond temptation. One rejects a potential lover because of his political misconduct; a second is unable to persuade a priest to abandon his vows of celibacy; a third limits herself to platonic self-restraint. Sara no doubt was restrained herself by the fiction-writing conventions of her time; only the most daring novelists wrote about adultery, and they were abused for it. My own intuition is, however, that Sara's personal convictions were chiefly responsible for the limits she placed on her fiction.

Whatever his own moral convictions, the reader of Sara Jeannette Duncan's novels is often left in some confusion. Both the individualistic heroine and the society against which she reacts seem to be condemned.

The explanation may be found in Sara's character, a mixture … of daring and conservatism. Like her early heroines, she longed for freedom and adventure, and was determined enough to make her dreams into reality. Yet from first to last she never abandoned the conservative values she probably absorbed in her youth. She loved the monarchy and was deeply suspicious of democracy. She never questioned the worth of free enterprise, of standards of taste in literature and in life, and of British political institutions. Her values, in short, were often closer to those of the conventional people she mocked than to the values of the more extreme rebels they rejected. In her final Indian novel, The Burnt Offering, Sara's sympathies became so closely identified with the British interest, then being severely challenged by Indian agitation, that she glamorized the officials and heaped ridicule upon her last nonconformist, a British girl who dared to contemplate marriage with a Hindu.

Recent critics have observed that the uncertainties arising out of the transition from Victorian to modern consciousness made a major impact on both the form and the substance of the late Victorian and turn of the century novel.

Writers such as Henry James, E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad perceived and dramatized the inherent confusion in minds which had abandoned old values without finding adequate substitutes. Sara Jeannette Duncan was certainly aware of ethical changes; in her early journalism she wrote a great deal, if not very precisely, about the modern spirit and in her novels she sometimes explicitly comments on such developments. But I cannot feel that Sara Jeannette Duncan really understood the drift towards a modern consciousness. In some, though not all, respects, she embodied it, but she was too divided in her loyalties to be able to present it effectively in her work.

The value of Sara Jeannette Duncan's fiction is sometimes, but not always, undercut by her failures of comprehension. When her heroines are too extreme for her own taste, her satire becomes aimless, since it is simultaneously directed at both liberal and conservative attitudes, and the only moral standard is the author's consciousness of her own rectitude. But when the heroine is imaginative and relatively emancipated without being radical or immoral, Sara has a standard of character which makes her satire of conventionality effective. The result may not be a revelation of human nature or the contemporary situation, but it can be a clearly structured, ethically coherent, sharply observed and entertaining fiction.

Most of Sara Jeannette Duncan's books have points of interest, but only five, in my judgment, can be termed successful and whole novels: An American Girl in London; The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib; His Honour, and a Lady; The Imperialist, and Cousin Cinderella. In each case one of the principal women characters (Mamie Wick, Mrs. Perth Macintyre, Rhoda Daye, Advena Murchison and Mary Trent respectively) resists or at least scorns conventional behaviour without venturing into radicalism. Each of these characters is given a distinctive personality, but each, in her own way, is superior in imagination to her environment, and conscious of her superiority. In each case, the plot, the dialogue and the narrator's comments all serve to reinforce the reader's consciousness of the qualitative distinction between the heroine and her uncomprehending milieu.

The novels may have a similarity of theme and outlook, but they display considerable variety in fictional technique. Sara did not seriously emulate the technical innovations of Henry James, though in certain novels she tries to be equally obscure. She was content (as were writers like E. M. Forster or Arnold Bennett) to remain within the formal conventions of the nineteenth century novel. Within those limits, however, she worked with several writing styles and narrative techniques.

Of the five novels I have just listed, three are first person narratives, and two are told in the third person. Of Sara Jeannette Duncan's total output, nine books are in the first person and eleven in the third. This apparently even balance conceals a pronounced switch in preference from first person to third; her first four books, and six of her first eight, were written in the first person, but of the nine novels written after 1903, only one (Cousin Cinderella) is in the first person.

It did not take Sara Jeannette Duncan long to master the art of revealing character through first person narration. As we have seen, the narrator of A Socia Departure is not especially well defined, but the clever characterization of Mamie Wick, the narrator of An American Girl in London, is largely responsible for that novel's charm. The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib represents another advance, in that Mrs. Perth Macintyre is a much more subtle and enigmatic character than Mamie Wick. Mary Trent of Cousin Cinderella is also a brilliantly successful characterization.

Sara Jeannette Duncan's efforts to achieve an equally satisfying style of impersonal narration were not always so fortunate. A Daughter of To-Day, the first attempt at third person narration, is, not surprisingly, as awkward in its way as A Social Departure. After a relatively slight challenge in the juvenile Story of Sonny Sahib, Miss Duncan revealed a technical assurance in her next major novel, His Honour, and a Lady, that she never subsequently surpassed or perhaps even repeated. This novel, from which the account of the Dayes' dinner party was taken, evokes the official world of Calcutta masterfully without resorting to the lengthy authorial commentary of some of the later works. In the dinner party scene, for example, Mrs. Daye is caught gazing at her prospective son-in-law, Lewis Ancram:

His eyes were certainly blue and expressive when he allowed them to be, his hostess thought, and he had the straight, thin, well-indicated nose which she liked, and a sensitive mouth for a man. His work as part of the great intelligent managing machine of the Government of India overimpressed itself upon the stamp of scholarship Oxford had left on his face, which had the pallor of Bengal, with fatigued lines about the eyes, lines that suggested to Mr. Ancram's friends the constant reproach of overexertion.… It was ridiculous, Mrs. Daye thought, that with so agreeable a manner he should still convey the impression that one's interest in the Vedic Books was not of the least importance. It must be that she was over-sensitive. But she would be piqued notwithstanding. Pique, when one is plump and knows how to hold oneself, is more effective than almost any other attitude.

In the space of a few sentences, Sara Jeannette Duncan provides Mrs. Daye's thoughts about Ancram (twice), his friends' view of Ancram, Mrs. Daye's image of herself, and, finally, the narrator's less flattering view of Mrs. Daye. In a later scene, Sara shows that she can be equally skilful in presenting a sustained succession of one character's thoughts. Ancram is seen rationalizing his decision to break off the engagement with Rhoda Daye:

Nothing could be more obvious than that the girl did not care for him; and, granting this, was he morally at liberty, from the girl's own point of view, to degrade her by a marriage which was, on her side, one of pure ambition? If her affections had been involved in the remotest degree—but he shrugged his shoulders at the idea of Rhoda Daye's affections. He wished to Heaven, like any schoolboy, that she would fall in love with somebody else, but she was too damned clever to fall in love with anybody. The thing would require a little finessing; the rupture must come from her.

The first rank of Sara Jeannette Duncan's fiction includes only one other novel written in the third person, The Imperialist. Here again, she can enter persuasively into a character's thoughts if she chooses. Perhaps aided by memories of her own mother, she gives a vigorous and colloquial impression of Mrs. Murchison's despair about her house:

The originating Plummer, Mrs. Murchison often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money to live up to them.… It was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances which she simply could not control, but Mrs. Murchison often declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there. It did not stop there. Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs. Murchison in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece.… She had far too much, as she declared, for any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling was not dropping in the drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library, or the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah wanted reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not to put his foot through it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just have to drop.

The virtues and limitations of Mrs. Murchison's practical wisdom are very effectively captured in this passage, but on the whole such passages are far less frequent than in His Honour, and a Lady. Much more often, Sara Jeannette Duncan chooses to communicate information through an impersonal and omniscient narrator. We could find out about Elgin's religious temper through the musings of one of the novel's two ministers, but instead the narrator tells us what to think:

In wholesome fear of mistake, one would hesitate to put church matters either before or after politics among the preoccupations of Elgin. It would be safer and more indisputable to say that nothing compared with religion but politics, and nothing compared with politics but religion. In offering this proposition also we must think of our dimensions. There is a religious fervour in Oxford, in Mecca, in Benares, and the sign for these ideas is the same; we have to apply ourselves to the interpretation. In Elgin, religious fervour was not beautiful, or dramatic, or selfimmolating; it was reasonable.

Few modern novelists would guide the reader in so direct and forceful a manner. It is, however, the method of most of the great eighteenth and nineteenth century English novelists, and should not be condemned out of hand. The real question is not whether the method is right or wrong, but whether Sara Jeannette Duncan uses it to good purpose.

William Dean Howells is always a useful source of comparison with Sara Jeannette Duncan, since we know Sara admired his work. In Howells' first major novel of American life, A Modern Instance, there is a comparable passage about the place of religion in a small Maine town:

Religion there had largely ceased to be a fact of spiritual experience, and the visible church flourished on condition of providing for the social needs of the community. It was practically held that the salvation of one's soul must not be made too depressing, or the young people would have nothing to do with it. Professors of the sternest creeds temporized with sinners, and did what might be done to win them to heaven by helping them to have a good time here. The church embraced and included the world.

The generalization is different, but the air of patronising detachment is very similar. If one of each novel's main objects is to convince the reader that the author thoroughly understands Elgin, or Equity, Maine, then the omniscient style of narration can be justified as the appropriate medium for that particular message.

The technical challenge for the novelist using this method is that he must persuade the reader of his qualifications for assuming so imperious a role. To be taken as authoritative, he must write authoritatively. It is in her execution, rather than in her choice of method, that Sara Jeannette Duncan sometimes fails to impress, in The Imperialist and elsewhere. Her remarks about religion may be as wise as Howells's views, but they are not nearly as effective stylistically. The Howells passage is smoothly written, and smoothly integrated with the story: a few sentences later, Howells says, "But Bartley Hubbard [the central character] liked the religious situation well enough" and moves from some character analysis back into the plot. The Sara Jeannette Duncan passage occurs about halfway through an entire chapter of generalizations, and in reading it one is deterred from accepting its content wholeheartedly by doubts about its manner. Is "more indisputable" a suitable expression? The third sentence is awkward and the fourth obscure—what does the part after the semicolon mean? Also, one suspects that the religious fervour of Oxford, Mecca and Benares is similar only if an author is trying to make a rhetorical point.

None of these criticisms is significant in itself. It is important, though, that the reader's confidence not be undermined by doubts about grammar, fluency, rhetoric and the validity of generalizations. To be fair, it must be added that in The Imperialist, Sara Jeannette Duncan inspires confidence more often than not. In some other works, the inadequacy of the narrator is a basic fault of the novel.

Several of the works I have in mind immediately precede The Imperialist. Between 1899 and 1903, Sara published four books. One of them, Those Delightful Americans, is narrated by a provincial Englishwoman and captures a particular manner of speaking and thinking very effectively. The other three, all of them potentially of considerable interest, are disfigured by stylistic experimentation. Sara always attempted to achieve originality of manner, but in this period a very precious style is combined with strained and unsuccessful efforts at psychological subtlety.

The difference between good and bad Sara Jeannette Duncan prose can be easily demonstrated. In a passage from one of her better books, An American Girl in London, the heroine goes in search of lodgings:

One of the drawing-rooms was "draped" in a way that was quite painfully aesthetic, considering the paucity of the draperies. The flower-pots were draped, and the lamps; there were draperies round the piano-legs, and round the clock; and where there were not draperies there were bows, all of the same scanty description. The only thing that had not made an effort to clothe itself in the room was the poker, and by contrast it looked very nude. There were some Japanese ideas around the room, principally a paper umbrella; and a big painted palm-leaf fan from India made an incident in one corner.… [The landladyl came into the room in a way that expressed reduced circumstances and a protest against being obliged to do it. I feel that the particular variety of smile she gave me with her "Good morning!"—although it was after 4 P.M.—was one she kept for the use of boarders only, and her whole manner was an interrogation.

The interview goes on for another two pages. The incident in itself is a very trivial one, but Sara has brought it to life. We see the absurd pretentiousness of the room and the pathetic gentility of the landlady; the narrator is wittily superior to the scene without being snobbish herself. Sara's success with a light subject is all the more evident when we consider her later efforts to grapple with a much more substantial matter. In the title story of The Pool in the Desert, the narrator discusses the social consequences in British India of a scandalous divorce:

Mrs. Harbottle was only twenty-seven then and Robert a major, but he had brought her to India out of an episode too color-flushed to tone with English hedges; their marriage had come, in short, of his divorce, and as too natural a consequence. In India it is well known that the eye becomes accustomed to primitive pigments and high lights; the esthetic consideration, if nothing else, demanded Robert's exchange. He was lucky to get a [Punjab] regiment, and the Twelfth were lucky to get him; we were all lucky, I thought, to get Judy. It was an opinion, of course, a great deal challenged, even in Rawul Pindi, where it was thought, especially in the beginning, that acquiescence was the most the Harbottles could hope for. That is not enough in India; cordiality is the common right. I could not have Judy preserving her atmosphere at our tea-parties and gymkhanas. Not that there were two minds among us about "the case"; it was a preposterous case, sentimentally undignified, from some points of view deplorable. I chose to reserve my point of view, from which I saw it, on Judy's behalf, merely quixotic, preferring on Robert's just to close my eyes.

One dimly suspects that the narrator is suggesting that she herself is more sensitive and broad-minded than her Anglo-Indian compatriots, but any interest in characterization is shattered by the effort required to make any sense whatever out of the passage. Contemporary reviewers claimed to sniff the influence of Henry James in Sara Jeannette Duncan's work of this period. Perhaps they were right, but the effect of indirection in her case was to obscure motivation and thought processes, rather than to illuminate them, as James does.

It might be suggested that the two passages just quoted merely prove that Sara Jeannette Duncan was at her best in light comedy and could not handle more serious emotions. There is an element of truth in this view, in that Sara's treatment of serious personal relationships is often unsatisfactory. But three of the five novels I have found to be her best (The Simple Adventures of s Memsahib, His Honour, and a Lady and Cousin Cinderella) all have a pronounced streak of melancholy. The central characters' relationships with others are not always successfully described, but the sadness of their isolation is convincingly realised. In a passage superficially about the comforts of domesticity, the narrator of Cousin Cinderella reveals her provincial uncertainty in the metropolis:

All this time the flat was our constant joy, the basis and background for the whole pageant, solidly our own for retreat and reflection, always invitingly there. It made a kind of stronghold for us, against feeling too much as London wanted us, wanted everybody to feel—I mean impressed and intoxicated and carried away … with rapture to let her play upon us any tune she liked. The flat stood for us, just for Graham and me … it was somehow good for our selfrespect to drive from marble halls and talk it over in front of Miss Game's twelve remaining mantel ornaments, when Graham had made up the fire in the grate. And if it was a retreat when London was too alluring, it was also a refuge when she set us at naught, and made us more or less conscious of lapses and blunders and country manners.

This passage has the clarity of the quotation from An American Girl in London, as well as the emotional subtlety Sara Jeannette Duncan was trying so desperately to achieve in the passage from "The Pool in the Desert." The writing is not simple, but it draws attention to the character of the narrator, rather than to itself. There is a smooth progression, in emotional and logical terms, from one statement to the next, rather than a breathless succession of stops and starts.

Having learned to become a skilful and subtle writer, Sara Jeannette Duncan did not practise her mature art for long. The four novels written from 1904 to 1909, from The Imperialist through Set in Authority and Cousin Cinderella to The Burnt Offering, are all serious, thoughtful, substantial works. Then, after a weak attempt at a political novel (The Consort, 1912), Sara turned to writing the light fiction of her early career. It is easier to repeat conventions than to recapture their spirit, however, and these last books are joyless productions.

Sara's last significant novel was published thirteen years before her death. As she was only sixty when she died, we can hardly blame senility for her decline. Nor did she become less conscientious: the manuscripts of plays written in her last period show that she worked doggedly at revising them.

There are three speculative explanations one can offer to account for the barrenness of this period. Perhaps, to begin with a simple possibility, Sara Jeannette Duncan was just artistically tired after seventeen books; not tired enough to give up going through the motions, but too tired to produce effective results. It is also possible that she drew unfortunate conclusions about the critical reception of her work. Of the four ambitious novels just mentioned, only one (Set in Authority) was much praised; The Imperialist was very sharply attacked, Cousin Cinderella was judged worthy of lukewarm approval, and The Burnt Offering does not seem to have been widely reviewed. Sara might well have looked back fondly to the dazzling success of her first two books, and resolved to emulate their style.

In her later years Sara Jeannette Duncan developed a passionate interest in the theatre, and it seems likely that this new interest affected her ambitions as a novelist. In addition to writing several independent plays, she produced adaptations of all three of her last novels; their energetic plots, and the virtual abandonment of narration in favour of dialogue, suggest that the theatre might have been her objective right from the start. Sadly enough, if indeed she worried about her success as a novelist, she eventually had much more reason to be depressed about her failures as a dramatist.

We have been forced to acknowledge that in Sara Jeannette Duncan's fictional bushel, not all the apples are first grade. Some are too small, and many have imperfections. But some are very good.…