Sara Jeanette Duncan

The Imperialist. Novel by Sara Jeanette Duncan

Duncan is best known today for her 1904 novel The Imperialist, which tells the story of Lorne Murchison, a young lawyer in the fictional town of Elgin, Ontario who becomes an advocate of imperial preferential trade and unsuccessfully runs for the Parliament of Canada for the Liberal Party. The book has been widely praised by scholars as a sensitive and perceptive portrait of small-town Ontario at the turn of the twentieth century, and at the social mores of the time and place. While it has been lauded for its subtle grasp of women's place in society, it has also been criticized for focusing on upper-class and middle-class people over workers and the poor, and for its brutally racist depiction of Aboriginal people.