The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan, Fiction, Classics, Literary 12+

📗 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.