Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861-1922), a ground-breaking journalist with "The Washington Post" and "The Toronto Globe," travelled around the world with a female friend, unthinkable for women then. In India she met her husband Everard Cotes. The Brantford, Ontario-born Duncan began producing novels, plays, essays and more, including "An American Girl in London" (1891), and her best-known work, "The Imperialist" (original 1904; edited version by Thomas E. Tausky, 1996, Tecumseh).

Sara Jeannette Duncan was a well-known journalist when, in 1888, she and fellow journalist Lily Lewis did something delightfully shocking. In a significant departure from the social norms of the day, these two young, unmarried women traveled around the world, with neither a male escort nor a chaperone, and filed a series of articles about their unorthodox adventures. Their high-profile articles were popular in the United States and Canada, so it was not surprising when a British women´s magazine called The Lady´s Pictorial invited Duncan to publish a fictional version in serial form. This text was the basis of her first novel, A Social Departure, the critical and commercial success of which led immediately to a change in Duncan´s professional status. Although she would continue to write critical essays and to work as a journalist occasionally, Duncan had suddenly become a best-selling novelist of international stature. It was the beginning of a long and productive career.

This new edition provides much context by clarifying literary, historical, and culturally-specific references, and it reprints a selection of the travel articles written by Duncan and Lewis. Exploring a range of innovative topics, it offers a selection of critical essays by Denise Heaps, Peggy Martin, Eli MacLaren, Caroline Lieffers and Aya Fujiwara, and Emily J. Bruusgaard.

Duncan´s novel The Imperialist is about an adolescent nation seeking to define its own identity, "We are at the making of a nation": the narrator tells us at one point. Lorne Murchison, the imperialist of the title, thinks Canada is at a crucial moment in her political destiny, and seeks ardently to convert others to his vision of Canada as a leading force in an imperial partnership. In the small Ontario city of Elgin, obsessed with politics at all times, tensions mount as a hard-fought by-election takes place. As Lorne says in his fiery concluding speech, "The question that underlies this decision for Canada is that of the whole stamp and character of her future existence." When asked by the Globe and Mail "What book would you recommend to a foreigner who wants to understand Canada," Carol Shields picked The Imperialist: "It deals with how Canadians think in the moderate sense of being Canadian. What it means to be liberal, for example. Having been written during the early part of the century, you wouldn´t have thought The Imperialist would have been so prophetic. Her book is charming as well as intelligent." This edition includes extensive explanatory notes and the complete texts of Duncan´s letters about The Imperialist. Reprints essays or extracts from published books by: Peter Allen, Carl Berger, Carole Gerson, Ajay Heble, Michael Peterman, Clara Thomas, and Francis Zichy; as well as essays written specifically for it by: Terrence L. Craig, Frank Davey, Teresa Hubel, Elisabeth Köster, and Thomas E. Tausky

The vague outline of an ironical omniscient narrator in The Imperialist becomes in Cousin Cinderella one of Duncan's most engaging and sympathetic female characters, Mary Trent; her self discovery as narrator of the text is subtly created as a moment of self-recognition for the Canadian reader.
None of Duncan's previous narrators are as emphatically Canadian as Mary Trent; none are called upon to represent Canada, to serve as "samples" of the Canadian "natural product" of which Senator Trent is so proud, "finished" not by London or New York society, but by Canadian life.

For all that she played no part in the administration of British India, the memsahib as wife, mother and mistress has figured prominently in the complex mythology of that society. In fiction and non-fiction alike, the memsahib has been portrayed as heroine, martyr, and villainess. Sara Jeannette Duncan, on the contrary, concerned herself with the mundane life of the ordinary memsahib. It is her distinctive achievement that she combines entertaining craftsmanship with an absence of melodrama. Her Helen Browne, Duncan convinces us, is what most memsahibs really were like.

Duncan believed that one of the defining aspects of modern fiction is directly related to gender: the attempt to portray a new kind of heroine, substituting an active, thinking subject for the passive, instinctual object of patriarchal fiction. In her column of October 28, 1886 in The Week, Duncan deplores the limited exalted sphere to which women are relegated as heroines of sentimental fiction and complains that such characters are simply static devices for the forwarding of the plot, "the painted pivot of a merry-go-round."
Elfrida Bell, the "daughter of today," is an attempt at a realistic picture of a career female artist of the 1890s, who rejects marriage and even love as inimical to her ideal of achievement.