The Pool in the Desert

Four novellas of Anglo-Indian life. "A Mother in India" is told by a woman who sent her daughter home to England as a baby, as everyone did, and meets her again at twenty-one as a stranger she does not like — and says so, with a candour that was very hard to print in 1903. "An Impossible Ideal" concerns a painter in Simla and the woman who will not be what his work requires. "The Hesitation of Miss Anderson" turns on a secret in a woman's past and a man who knows it. The title story gives a marriage, a friendship and a piece of information that arrives too late for anyone to act on decently.

Sara Jeannette Duncan was a Canadian journalist who married an official of the Indian Museum and spent most of her writing life in Calcutta and Simla. She published The Pool in the Desert in 1903, and the stories look at the British in India from inside the drawing-room, where the damage was mostly done.

This Bibliomancer edition presents all four stories complete.