Sara Jeannette Duncan (who sometimes wrote as Mrs. Everard Cotes) was a Canadian author and journalist. Beginning her career on the Washington Post, she made history as the first woman to be hired as a professional journalist in Canada, taking a regular position at the Toronto Globe, and later moving to the Montreal Star, where she was the paper's Parliamentary correspondent. She married Everard Cotes, a journalist and museum curator based in Calcutta. During her long residence with her husband in India she made a considerable reputation as a novelist of Anglo-Indian life. Duncan's style can be compared to contemporary satirists such as Stephen Leacock and Thomas Carlyle. "A Mother in India" recounts the trials of an officer's wife, who must send her child back to relatives in England. The title story covers a period of years in a wife's life, and the changes wrought by the arrival of a new officer and his second wife, as they become acclimated to India and accepted by the community.

Author Biography

Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861 - 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.