ESC: English Studies in Canada

4 Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, vol. 3, p. 347. 5 Observations, pp. 46, 6; quoted from Burnham, 43. 6 “ The Defence of the Philosophick Cabbala,” ch. 1, pp. 77, 76; in Several Philo­ sophical Writings (1662), vol. 2, sig. L114, L113V. m i c h a e l h . k e e f e r / Université Sainte-Anne Marian Fowler, Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan (Toronto: Anansi, 1983). 333. $7.95 paper, $19.95 cloth The ideal biographer commands the skills of both historian and novelist. She knows where to gather relevant data and how to use it to illuminate and capture the subject’s being and life. Marian Fowler brought a generous endowment of both skills to the writing of Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan. As the first scholar in the field she felt her obligations as historian powerfully. She has therefore laid out the documentary evidence carefully, presenting letters and newspaper references in their entirety. She was inven­ tive in finding material which conveyed the tenor of the time, the feel of places, and the characteristics of people Duncan encountered. For the research of Fowler the historian we can be nothing but grateful, since it means that the biography can be used as a point of departure for future work on Duncan. But it was Fowler the novelist who sets a brisk pace, writes in a beguilingly lively style, and creates the book’s peaks and troughs. Let us begin with the biography’s strengths. Its first four chapters are a delight. In them we follow Duncan from her early years in Brantford, through her experiences as a young journalist in New Orleans, Washington, Toronto, and Montreal, and on through her trip around the world. We are startled to discover how many feminists there were in Brantford during the 1880s; Duncan numbered among her friends there the first two women doctors to be trained in Canada and the poet Pauline Johnson, knew Brant­ ford’s first female principal of a public school, and probably knew the two women who wrote for the Brantford Courier. We observe Duncan setting her sights on a succession of journalistic positions, see her charm a series of men (father-figures all) into helping her gain them, and then watch her fall into disillusion and boredom once she mastered their challenge. In these early chapters Fowler’s vivacious style compliments her subject’s lively young self. Her introduction of floral images to characterize Duncan’s successive experiences is inspired and apt, capturing her sparkling feminity. Fowler also structures her story well. The long opening Brantford chapter establishes a series of contrasts marking the extremes between which Dun­ can vacillated all her life. The opposed strengths of her parents marked her strongly. To her father she owed a “masculine” drive and her ambition for material success, her rigid attitude to social convention, and her realism; to her mother she owed a love of formal rose gardens (and of flowers in general), a consciousness of class distinctions, and a yearning for romance. Her father was ultimately responsible for her “feminism,” her mother for her femininity. In the town of Brantford was another opposition which Dun­ can absorbed initially from her parents — the contrary tugs of British and American ideals. Anglophilia appeared in the town’s delight in formal ritual and in its patriotic fervour. Britain represented stability and tradition; its manners and mores dominated social life. On the other hand, American bustle, know-how, and capital dominated the town’s commercial life. Fowler characterizes each of the contraries Duncan absorbed from her parents and her home town vividly. These then become leitmotifs, keeping the opposi­ tions established in the first chapter firmly in the mind’s eye as Duncan ventured forth into the world. Midway through her trip around the world, Duncan met Everard Charles Cotes, an entomologist with a local museum in Calcutta. A romantic him­ self, he recognized Duncan’s own romantic streak and thus pursued her to Agra where he surprised her in the rose garden of the Taj Mahal and pro­ posed by moonlight. Duncan accepted. From this point on Fowler’s touch is less certain...