Seeking justice in India.

• Author: Normey, Robert
• Position: Law and literature - Set in Authority by Sarah Jeannette Duncan

This year's Canada Reads contest on CBC featured a final showdown between Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and an unknown novel by Frank Parker Day, Rockbound, published way back in 1928. The surprise winner was Rockbound, a powerful regional novel about a small group of fishermen on an island off Nova Scotia and their harsh, haunted lives. It was the book chosen by the panel as the one everyone in Canada should read. It was fascinating to see such an obscure work come to prominence through the contest.

I have recently read an equally obscure novel dating back even further than Rockbound. Set in Authority is a 1906 novel by Sarah Jeannette Duncan. It has been published in recent years in a handsome edition with an informative introduction and notes in the Broadview Literary Texts series. Duncan is known to students of Canadian literature as the author of The Imperialist (1904). That novel has a Canadian setting and is known as a fine, pioneering work. Few who have read it are likely to have read Set in Authority, however.

Duncan was born in Brantford, Ontario (the "Elgin" of The Imperialist) in 1861, the eldest surviving child of a family of eleven children. Her father, Charles Duncan, was an immigrant from Scotland who operated a successful dry goods and furniture store. Duncan was trained as a teacher but found work as a journalist in the 1880s. She worked for several newspapers in Canada and the US and became the first woman to be employed full-time on the staff of The Globe. By 1888, she had become stationed in Ottawa as one of the Montreal Daily Star's parliamentary correspondents.

In the fall of 1888, Duncan travelled with a fellow journalist around the world in eight months. Her impressions made up her first book, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890). This book received great reviews and launched Duncan on a prolific literary career. She went on to publish 21 more books in a variety of forms and on diverse subjects.

At a vice regal reception in Calcutta, Duncan met Everard Coates, a museum official and subsequently a journalist. The couple married in 1890 and resided in India until 1915. Duncan would also visit Canada a number of times during this period. Nearly half of her books have India as their setting.

A trial takes place in Duncan's Canadian novel, The Imperialist. In the first part of the novel, the protagonist Lorne Murchison comes to prominence by winning an acquittal for the son...