The Canadian author Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes) is today best known for her 1904 novel of Ontario life, “The Imperialist” (also available as a LibriVox recording), but in Duncan’s own time readers were impressed more by her other works, including “A Daughter of Today,” published in 1894. <br /><br />“A Daughter of Today” follows the story of Elfrida Bell, a young woman who escapes the American Midwest to pursue first an artistic education in Paris, and then a novice career in journalism in London. As the novel’s title indicates, Elfrida is a product “of today,” i.e., of her day — the 1890s. She is swept up in the heady notions of that period: Aestheticism (“art for art’s sake”), fin-de-siècle Decadence, and ideas about the “New Woman” who breaks free of bourgeois conventions. With the self-absorption of youth, Elfrida sets about constructing herself along these lines. She pursues this project with bracing energy, mixed with pretension and affectation: “In nothing tha
