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SET IN AUTHORITY
Sara Jeannette Duncan
edited by Germaine Warkentin
broadview literary texts
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© 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
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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
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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
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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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
