The Crow's-Nest
1901
A woman who has been banished to the garden of a remote Simla residence reacts with exactly the indignation you'd expect from someone who finds nature 'ill-mannered.' Sara Jeannette Duncan's narrator is the kind of woman who belongs indoors, among her books and china, and she makes her displeasure known with sharp, complainy wit. But something happens in this exile. As she watches the light move across the mountains, observes the local staff going about their lives, and grudgingly notices that the roses are perhaps not entirely objectionable, she begins to find the garden is less of a punishment than she assumed. The novel balances delightful grumbling with quieter moments of discovery, a comedy of manners trapped in a pastoral setting, British in its disdain for weather, yet quietly radical in suggesting that a woman might find unexpected freedom in being pushed to the margins. Duncan writes with a modern-feeling self-awareness, waspish and unwilling to perform reverence for the sublime.
