The Pool in the Desert

Anglo-India in four long stories: a mother meets as a grown woman the daughter she sent home to England in infancy; an artist with an impossible ideal among the station gossips; a girl who hesitates too long; and the title story of a woman who gives up her happiness out of pride. Duncan talked her way onto the Toronto Globe as its first woman on staff and circled the globe in 1888 with a female colleague; she married in Calcutta and wrote the Raj from inside the drawing rooms, which is why it is so cold. Fifty-seven paintings from 1795 to 1928, by Munch, Lavery and others, dwell on houses and interiors, the rooms of exile that give these stories of the English in India their chill.