The Imperialist - Softcover

Duncan, Sara Jeannette

2.48

159 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771099789 ISBN 13: 9780771099786

Publisher: New Canadian Library, 1990

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Sara Jeannette Duncan’s classic portrait of a turn-of-the-century Ontario town, The Imperialist captures the spirit of an emergent nation through the example of two young dreamers. Impassioned by “the Imperialist idea,” Lorne Murchison rests his bid for office on his vision of a rejuvenated British Empire. His sister Advena betrays a kindred attraction to the high-flown ideals in her love for an unworldly, and unavailable, young minister. Nimbly alternating between politics and romance, Duncan constructs a superbly ironic object-lesson in the Canadian virtue of compromise.

Sympathetic, humorous, and wonderfully detailed, The Imperialist is an astute analysis of the paradoxes of Canadian nationhood, as relevant today as when the novel was first published in 1904.

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From the Back Cover:

Set in the fictional Ontario town of Elgin at the beginning of the twentieth century, this 1904 novel was in its own time addressed largely to British readers. It has since become a Canadian classic, beloved for its ironic and dryly humorous portrait of small-town life. But The Imperialist is also a fascinating representation of race, gender, and nationalism in Britain’s “settler colonies.” This Broadview edition provides a wealth of contextual material invaluable to understanding the novel’s historical context, and particularly the debate, central to the story, over Edwardian Canada’s role in the British Empire.

This edition includes a critical introduction and, in the appendices, excerpts from Sara Jeannette Duncan’s journalism and autobiographical sketches (including an essay on “North American Indians”), speeches by Canadian and British politicians, political cartoons, and recipes for the dishes served at the novel’s social gatherings. Contemporary reviews of the novel from British, Canadian, and American periodicals are also included.

About the Author:

Sara Jeannette Duncan was born in Brantford, Ontario, in 1861. She attended the Toronto Normal School, then left teaching for a career in journalism. She worked as an editorial writer and book reviewer for the Washington Post, then wrote for the Toronto Globe under the name of “Garth Grafton,” and contributed a column to whose founder was Goldwin Smith. She was also parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa for the Montreal Star.

In 1888 Duncan set off on a round-the-world trip as correspondent for the New York World and the Montreal Star. In Calcutta she met her future husband, Everard Cotes, an Englishman serving there as curator of the Indian Museum. They married two years later. Duncan lived in India for twenty-five years, with extended stays abroad in London and frequent trips to Canada.

A prolific and popular writer of fiction, Duncan set nearly half of her novels in India. The Imperialist (1904), generally considered her finest, is her only novel set in Canada. During and after World War One she devoted much of her time to playwrighting.

In 1922 Duncan and her husband retired to England.

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

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