Set in Authority PDF
Preview Set in Authority
This electronic material is under copyright protection and is provided to a single recipient for review purposes only. Review Copy SET IN AUTHORITY Sara Jeannette Duncan edited by Germaine Warkentin broadview literary texts Review Copy © 1996 Germaine Warkentin All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo- copying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher — or in the case of photocopying, a licence from cancopy (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency) 6 Ade- laide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5CIH6— is an infringe- ment of the copyright law. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Duncan, Sarajeannette, 1861-1922 Set in authority (Broadview literary texts) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-55111-080-6 I. Warkentin, Germaine, 1933- . II. Title. III. Series. PS8457.085S41996 C813' .4 C96-930153-7 PR9I99.2.D8S4 1996 Broadview Press, Post Office Box 1243, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada K9J7H5 in the United States of America: 3576 California Road, Orchard Park, NY 14127 in the United Kingdom: B.R.A.D. Book Representation and Distribution Ltd., 244A London Road, Hadleigh, Essex SS72 DE Broadview Press is grateful to Professor Eugene Benson for advice on edi- torial matters for the Broadview Literary Texts series. Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ministry of Canadian Heritage. PRINTED IN CANADA Review Copy Sara Jeannette Duncan in 1909 (Photograph from Putnam's Reader, Vol V, October I908-March 1909 p. 502. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library) Review Copy This page intentionally left blank Review Copy Contents Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 9 Set in Authority 63 Notes 274 Appendix I: Viceroys 294 Appendix II: Contemporary Reviews of Set in Authority 312 A Note on the Text 324 Variants in the 1906 New York Edition 328 Sara Jeanette Duncan: A Brief Chronology 334 Review Copy Acknowledgements IN editing Set in Authority — and particularly in devising the annota- tion — I have incurred debts almost too extensive to acknowledge, though I plan to do so as soon as the many friends I harassed with queries are speaking to me again. My most important debt is to Elaine Zinkhan, who at the urging of Carole Gerson, to whom I am also grateful, contacted me about new and quite unknown material on Duncan which had recently become available in the A. P. Watt Papers at the University of North Carolina. Judith Skelton Grant list- ened and read attentively as the project developed. Helmut Reichenbacher provided essential research assistance. Andrew Lamb took the photograph of Egerton Crescent, and Ingrid Smith typed portions of the text. Among the many who helped with the annota- tion I owe specific debts to Joanna Barker, Joseph Black, James W. Cook, James M. Estes, Robin Healey, Jeffrey Heath, Peter Hinch- cliffe, Craig Jamieson, Jan Jenkins, Alexandra Johnston, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Bernard L. Karon, Clare Loughlin, Jane Millgate, Michael Millgate, Robert L. Montgomery Jr., Mark Nicholls, Sol Nigosian, Diana Patterson, Dylan Reid, Sanjay Sharma, John Warkentin, and Joan Winearls. I am grateful to the London Library, whose run of Duncan's novels, which I have constantly consulted, is nearly complete. I am also indebted to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto and to the EJ. Pratt Library of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. I am grateful to the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library and the British Library's India Office collections for permission to reproduce photographs in their possession. And finally I would like to thank the editorial team at Broadview Press, especially Don LePan and Barbara Conolly, for their support as the project transformed itself before our eyes. Germaine Warkentin Toronto 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Review Copy Introduction THE central incident in Sara Jeannette Duncan's novel Set in Authority (1906), around which all the other events in the novel revolve, is a trial. In the great Indian city of Calcutta, an English sol- dier is tried for the murder of a native, and condemned to hang by the appeal court which is reviewing the case. A trial also takes place early in Duncan's Canadian masterpiece The Imperialist, which pre- ceded Set in Authority by only two years. The first third of The Imper- ialist relates how Lome Murchison, the earnest and able lawyer son of one of the small town of Elgin's chief citizens, initially makes his name by winning an acquittal for the son of a prominent local land- owner charged with complicity in robbing the bank where he works. But in The Imperialist the real trial is in Chapter XXIX, when Lome, who believes he is "at the bar for the life of a nation," makes a passionate but imprudent political speech before the hard-nosed citizens of Elgin, and for the time being destroys the public career for which he is so superbly qualified. In The Imperialist we as readers are there in the audience; we hear the speech, recognize the hope- lessness of the Presbyterian minister's solitary applause, and eaves- drop on the whispers of Lome's disillusioned handlers. In Set in Authority the trial of Henry Morgan (his second; again there are two trials) takes place off-stage. We witness it only in the agitated gossip that spreads verdict and sentence from courthouse to newspaper and telegraph office, to market stall and English club, to the corridors of the India Office in London and the tea-tables of Bloomsbury and Kensington. And in the novel we never actually meet Henry Mor- gan himself. This clinical distance marks an important difference in approach between two of Duncan's attempts, within half a decade, at a single subject central both to her work and the problematics of her imper- ialist era: the question of how and by what right authority is main- tained. Her first book, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890), had mockingly addressed this question, both in its contrast between the high-spirited, uncon- ventional narrator and her travelling companion, the aptly-named Orthodocia,1 and in the flouting — in a story about two unmarried SET IN AUTHORITY 9 Review Copy young women travelling without a chaperone - of conventional ideas about the rules which ought to govern female behaviour. As Duncan's career progressed she returned, first in light satire and then with increasing depth, to the problem of authority, which by 1906 she had begun to see not just as an aspect of the colonial situ- ation, or as a feminist issue (though it was certainly both), but as a profound source of psychological and social conflict. In The Imperi- alist, the result had been a Bildungsroman, an affectionate portrait of a young man discovering the limits within which he must live, and — not incidentally - of a young society at work on the same task. Set in Authority is a book of middle age; almost all its characters have long since learned the lesson Lome Murchison is faced with. Its set- ting is not a new society, but two very old ones in wary confronta- tion with each other, and its manner is ruthlessly detached and ironic. Duncan's preoccupation with authority was an authentically modern one; much of the "decadent" writing of the^m de siecle and the Edwardian period had restlessly taken up the same problem, in a style and manner notoriously contemptuous of middle-class ortho- doxy. But though Duncan's concerns were progressive for her time, her characters and stories were often drawn from the world of the administrative upper class and the gentry, precisely the class the "decadents" set out to shock.2 As a novelist she has thus remained a somewhat ambivalent figure. For its original audience (in Britain as well as Canada) The Imperialist was too advanced; they resisted the density of social observation, the irony, and the sheer contempora- neity of what has proven to be the first truly modern Canadian novel. The book received bad reviews in both England and North America when it first appeared, and remained virtually unread until the I96os.3 In its day Set in Authority, which is even more ironic than The Imperialist but is set in scenes more attractive to an interna- tional audience, was both better known and better received. Nev- ertheless, for later readers it has often been Duncan's apparent lack of the modern, the glossy social surface of her novels with their debt to Trollope and Thackeray, which has led to neglect. Though Can- adians today are interested in Duncan, they read her other novels chiefly for the light they throw on what is now viewed as a found- 10 INTRODUCTION Review Copy ing work of Canadian fiction; elsewhere she appears only occasion- ally in the writings of students of feminism and post-colonialism trawling the backwaters of the Edwardian novel, and almost never in accounts of Anglo-Indian literature.4 In the summer of 1906, however, Duncan could content herself with the knowledge she had produced a success; Set in Authority had been serialized throughout the spring, and was published in book form by Constable on May 18, 1906. It was fairly widely reviewed (see Appendix II), and would be issued in the United States by Doubleday Page in the autumn.5 Throughout the summer of 1906 the London trade periodical The Bookman described Set in Authority as among the six-shilling novels "most in demand," in a list which included Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Other novels of the same year were John Galsworthy's The Man of Property, Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, and the American novelist Winston Churchill's best-seller about a local political boss, Coniston. It is evident from its conditions of publication and the places where it was reviewed that Set in Authority was a book of a specific type, destined for a specific audience: the middle-class one-volume novel intended both for the commercial lending libraries and an intelligent international reader- ship, a type which itself was "modern," having in the i88os defini- tively put to death the popular mid-Victorian three-decker which had built that audience. If Duncan chose to work within the limits of the middle-class novel, it is nevertheless apparent both from the book itself and from several thoughtful reviews it received that in Set in Authority she set out to test those limits rigorously. She chose two themes which were then deeply problematic for the class for which she wrote: the manner in which England ought to rule over its colonies, and the solitude and confusion of the woman who chooses to enter the public life of the professions, but as a consequence must renounce the protection automatically accorded her sister who accepts the private domain of "petticoat power." These themes are linked by a single, troubling vision, that of "institutional man" — the man whom society requires to "rule" in the public sphere, but who then negotiates his life in the private sphere in the narrow terms estab- lished by his public obligations. In the manner of its Victorian SET IN AUTHORITY 11
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