Dr. Bridgette Brown completed her doctorate in the Department of English in 2019. Her dissertation, “The South African War (1899-1902) and the Transperipheral Production of Canadian Literature,” studies the ways in which settler projects of whiteness are constructed in literature, demonstrating how these projects acted across national lines at the end of the nineteenth century. An extension of the research she conducted for her doctoral work on Sara Jeannette Duncan, Dr. Brown’s forthcoming essay, “Sara Jeannette Duncan’s ‘Colonial Editions’: Imperial Authorship, Novel Innovations, and Literary Feminism in Cousin Cinderella,” will be published in the summer issue of the journal Authorship. The summer issue has a special focus on authorship in Canadian Literature.
Dr. Brown’s essay examines the publishing conditions and reception history of Duncan’s understudied satirical novel Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl in London (1908) to contend that Duncan’s understanding of her reading audiences, and the gendered expectations of a woman writing in the early twentieth century, allowed her to advance the novel genre in an English imperial literary market. Cousin Cinderella foregrounds the circulation of people and printed material and is interested in their reading and interpretation through the networked connections that empire engenders. The essay further argues that Duncan’s global mobility and her perspective on Canada as a rejuvenating racial and economic presence in an enlarged world led her to the type of generic experimentation discerned in Cousin Cinderella and to a lesser extent The Imperialist of 1904. In Cousin Cinderella, Duncan extends both novelistic romance and realism through the trope of female authorship and the novel’s allegorized character Mary Trent. This essay highlights how Duncan features women in race-making and nation-making projects, where sentimental marriage functions allegorically for practical political and economic ends. Brown’s article brings together a study of authorship, literary analysis, and cultural history to contextualize and elucidate Duncan’s pathbreaking career.
Image of the witty frontispiece in Cousin Cinderella depicting the main characters, Mary and Graham Trent, as a “pair of colonial editions.”