Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan by Marian Fowler (review)

448 LEITERS IN CANADA 1983 then, is a tension between superficial thematic interests and more powerful and less controllable imaginative energies working through the language and the texts. What the anthology does not do is develop a sense of the differences between spoken and written discourse, though it does provide some indications. But it might have been useful to be more explicit about the kinds of translations involved in some ofthe texts, and more sophisticated about the kinds of texts that we discover in the book. Even so, Petrone has a nice light touch in proposing categories, and then leaving the texts to speakfor themselves. Perhapsinevitably, there are few moments in which the spellbinding intensity and casual ferocity of some of the most powerful Indian discourse come across, but the book does give a vivid picture of some aspects of an Indian inheritance, and sustains that wonderful fusion of the secularand sacred that characterizes so much that is crucial about Indian life. (J.E. CHAMBERLIN) Marian Fowler. Redney: ALife of Sara Jeannette Duncan House of Anansi. 336. ilIus. $19.95 SaraJeannette Duncan (1861-1922), nicknamed'Redney' by her family, is well known to Canadians as the author of The Imperialist (1904). Before Marian Fowler embarked on this biography, not much beyond this one salient fact was widely known. Fowler's scrutiny of Duncan's life and work unearths many a surprise: that she was the first woman to work in the editorial department of any leading Canadian newspaper (the Toronto Globe); that at fifteen in Brantford she was aware of Alexander Graham Bell's discovery of the telephone there and of his necessary flight to the us in pursuit of the capital to develop it (a flight Duncan herself was to imitate); that she hob-nabbed at different stages of her life with Goldwin Smith, Pauline Johnson, William Dean Howells, Henry James (who wrote her a snippy commentary on one of her manuscripts), and E.M. Forster. Fowler's biography is seductively readable. Except for its first chapter, it cleanly structures Duncan's life chronologically according to her various and dramatic meanderings: from Brantford through New Orleans (where she fell in love with the colourful Bohemian poet Joaquin Miller), Washington, various Canadian cities, then the world tour thatculminated in India with her marriage to Everard Cotes, an English entomologist at Calcutta's Indian Museum. Using recurring images - flowers and other plants, colours, limiting hoops and margins - and in flowing, graceful prose, Fowler attempts to draw together a life that seems to have been constantly on the verge of spinning apart from the sheer centrifugal energy generated by the mutually incompatible aspects of Duncan's personality. HUMANITIES 449 The challenge in treating Duncan's 'splintered self' (she wrote under various names and pseudonyms including the masculine 'Garth') is formidable. How does one reconcile a tough-minded feminist who shared some of the ideals of her friends Alice McGillivray and Augusta Stowe (among Canada's first few women doctors) and attended the Woman Suffragette Committee in 1886 with the somewhat snobbish social butterfly entranced with ostrich feathers and taffeta who jOined the chic London Ladies Empire Club in 1904? Fowler skirts the issue delicately, leaving the practical seekerafter 'materialisticgoals' simply to coexist with the sensual 'restless Romantic.' Though Fowler concludes Duncan was 'androgynous: this label does not satisfactorily resolve the dilemma. Certainly Duncan's personal dilemma reverberated through her writingreverberations Fowler traces with verve and economy by holding up the mirror of Duncan's art to illuminate the life. But how, one asks, could a talented and independentwoman ambitious from an earlyage to becomea writer and capable of The Imperialist churn out so many frivolous formula fictions? Fowler describes Duncan as 'very much a political animal,' yet nowhere discusses her politics except to explain how she wrote from Simla to the Globe for editorial clippings about the debates on Imperial federation for The Imperialist (which the Times later described as 'good reading barring the politics'). What were Duncan's political views? Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan whets the appetite for contexts. How did Duncan's journalism compare with that of her contemporaries? Were her feminist yearnings typical of the time...