Tonight, we’ll read a selection from “The Crow’s Nest”, also known as “On the other side of the latch” by Sara Jeanette Duncan, who also published as Mrs. Everard Cotes and Garth Grafton.

Duncan worked as a travel writer for Canadian newspapers and a columnist for the Toronto Globe and eventually the Washington Post. Later she made a journey to India and married an Anglo-Indian civil servant thereafter dividing her time between England and India. She wrote 22 works of fiction, many with international themes and settings.

Unlike her travel writing, The Crow’s Nest is a memoir of description and not action as Duncan spends her time in recovery at a mountain house in Simla, India as she undergoes a rest cure for tuberculosis.

In the passage we’ll read tonight, Duncan pauses contemplating her current situation and turns her attention to the garden at the home where she is exiled.

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