Sara Jeannette Duncan was an astute observer of Edwardian society and of the manifestations of British Imperialism. She was well aware of its glamour and its power. Emotionally, however, she remained engaged with Canada and, as a writer, she was particularly aware of the irony inherent in the peculiarly Canadian Imperialist ideology, at its peak of power when she left Canada in 1889. When Sara Duncan wrote The Imperialist in early 1900's she was in Simla, India, looking back some twelve years after she had left Canada, with a combination of sharp wit and affectionate nostalgia, at the fabric of life in a small town in Ontario as she remembered it. The third person narrative technique which she used for that novel is a distancing technique in itself; both historically and novelistically The Imperialist reads as a tale told from the past, though from a recent past. [snip] http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol1_2/&filename=thomas.htm --- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar