Sara Jeanette Duncan

This chapter looks at Sara Jeanette Duncan. Throughout Duncan's prolific career, she wrote approximately twenty novels about early Canadian nation-building, transatlantic and Anglo-Indian cultures, and the New Woman. Duncan is hailed as a central figure of Canadian literature. While relatively under-analysed compared to her more well-known novels such as The Imperialist (1904), Duncan's early journalism and the Canadian section of her first novel A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890) illuminate her nuanced life-long inquiry into colonial and gendered identities. In A Social Departure, Duncan offers an iconic image of Canadian, transatlantic, and women's literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Ultimately, she presents herself as both an emblem of cultural progress and a catalyst for social change.