Sara Jeanette Duncan

Sara Jeannette Duncan (22 December 1861 – 22 July 1922) was a Canadian author and journalist. She also published as Mrs. Everard Cotes among other names. First trained as a teacher in a normal school, she published poetry early in her life and after a brief period of teaching got a job as a travelling writer for Canadian newspapers and wrote a column for The Globe, a Toronto paper. Afterward she wrote for the Washington Post where she also gained editorial experience, being quickly put in charge of the current literature section. She continued to work as a writer and editor for Canadian publications until a journey to India, where she married an Anglo-Indian civil servant. From then on she divided her time between England and India, writing for publications in various countries, and then began to write fiction rather than journalism. She wrote 22 works of fiction, many with international themes and settings, novels which met with mixed acclaim and today are rarely read. She died in Ashtead, Surrey, England, a year after she moved there with her husband. In 2016, she was named a National Historic Person on the advice of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.

Born Sara Janet Duncan on 22 December 1861 at 96 West Street, Brantford, Canada West (now Ontario), she was the oldest daughter of Charles Duncan, a well-off Scottish immigrant who worked as a dry goods and furniture merchant, and his wife, Jane (née Bell), who was Canada-born of Irish descent. She trained as a teacher at Brantford Model School and Toronto Normal School but always had an eye on a literary career. She had poetry printed as early as 1880, two years before she fully qualified as a teacher. A period of supply teaching in the Brantford area came to an end in December 1884 when she travelled to New Orleans after persuading the The Globe newspaper in Toronto and the Advertiser in London, Ontario to pay her for articles about the World Cotton Centennial. Her articles were published under the pseudonym of "Garth" and were very successful: they were reprinted in other newspapers, and led The Globe to offer her a regular weekly column when she returned to Canada some months later.

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