A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan

Kelly L. Green is a freelance writer living in Ajax, Ontario.

Dean’s critical discussion of the works of little-known Canadian
author Sara Jeannette Duncan is both scholarly and enlightening. Dean
presents Duncan, whose works have been given short shrift by the reading
public in recent years, as a writer twice marginalized by her
society—once by geography and once by gender. It is her marginal
status that lends Duncan’s work particular historical significance,
and, Dean maintains, caused Duncan to develop an ironic literary code
that properly educated readers are meant to unravel for themselves.

Dean believes that Duncan’s work has been trivialized by earlier
critics who weren’t able to fathom her sense of irony, and who tried
to slot Duncan into a British or American mold. In this book, Dean
attempts to prove that Duncan was neither Victorian romantic nor
hard-nosed American realist. She was instead a Canadian colonial writer,
with tendencies toward Imperialism, idealism and feminism. Dean argues
that Duncan’s writing had value in its representation of a marginal
point of view, and in its basis in a uniquely Canadian philosophy.

Dean’s arguments are cogent and well-documented. There are several
fascinating chapters, including a notable discussion of Duncan’s
racial attitudes, reflected in both her journalism and her fiction.
Having spent many years in India, Duncan considered herself an expert on
racial conflict in that country. Dean maintains that while many of her
attitudes would be considered blatantly racist today, she was actually
quite progressive for her time.

Dean’s discussions of Duncan’s intellectual development; of her
delicate balancing of idealism and realism; and of the way in which
Duncan incorporated her gender, class, and colonial status into all her
writing, are similarly insightful. This work is ultimately successful on
two levels. Dean is convincing in her arguments that Duncan’s work is
worthy of both serious literary and historical attention. In addition,
she makes Duncan’s work interesting for readers who may never have
come in contact with it before.