My Letter of Confession: Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Late Imperial Rhetoric and Risk-Taking

Canadian writer Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861–1922) found early success as a journalist in North America, writing most of her novels after she migrated to India and England in 1890. Janice Fiamengo’s argument that the young Duncan developed an “insouciant public voice” in the ephemeral press invites inquiry into whether, and to what ends, she cultivated that voice after her move. A newly-discovered collection of Duncan’s letters shows that she continued to evolve the risk-taking persona of her early journalism, deploying it in this instance to enhance her relationship with India’s Vicereine Mary Curzon. In this correspondence, Duncan transforms a satirical sketch she published pseudonymously in London’s Daily Mail into an amusing anecdote that dramatizes her loyalty to the Vicereine. The letters thus reveal some of the rhetorical strategies that Duncan used to collapse the social hierarchy of the late British empire to her advantage while critiquing that same hierarchy.