Scottish Authors > Jane Duncan Novelist 1910-1976

"Jane Duncan" was the pseudonym used by Elizabeth Jane Cameron, who was born in Renton, Dumbartonshire, on 10th March 1910. Childhood holidays were spent in the Black Isle, Easter Ross, on her grandparents' croft "The Colony", which is the "Reachfar" of her novels. She graduated from Glasgow University and served in the WAAF during World War II. She lived in Jamaica for ten years, returning to Scotland in 1958 on the death of her husband.

Though she had enjoyed writing all her life, Duncan did not seek publication until her husband's serious illness. Still in Jamaica, in need of money and facing the prospect of widowhood, she submitted a novel to an agent in London, and, when it was accepted, revealed that she had completed six further manuscripts. They became the first volumes in the My friends, series, which eventually comprised 19 titles. My friends the Miss Boyds (1959), an immediate success on publication, begins the story of Janet Sandison, the narrator and central character of the series. Janet's life in the novels corresponds closely to the author's own, and Duncan's autobiographical work Letter from Reachfar (1975) identifies the source of many of her fictional characters and events.

Duncan's aim was to delineate Janet's character as it might be revealed gradually in conversation with a friend. Originally the reader was to meet her as an adult in My friend Muriel, learning about her happy childhood (The Miss Boyds) and troubled adolescence (Annie) much later in the series. The publishers' decision to begin with The Miss Boyds and continue in chronological sequence negated this more subtle and considered approach. Beyond this, Duncan is exploring the reality of "Reachfar", which Janet cherishes throughout her life as a symbol of innocence and truth:

Those days had come forward through life with me, a permanent background, clearly outlined in the brilliant northern light, that had influenced - and for good, I thought - every new experience that slid on to the stage of life in front of it. The light from that background had, for me, illumined everything.

But the idyllic "Reachfar" of The Miss Boyds is physically all but destroyed by the time of My friends George and Tom (1976), and Janet has sensed its spiritual vulnerability long before. Duncan's novels, readable and popular, are often dismissed as light fiction, but Francis Russell Hart considers them at some length in The Scottish novel (1978).

Duncan also published four novels under the pseudonym "Janet Sandison", beginning with Jean in the morning (1969). These were supposed, on one level at least, to be the novels which Janet, in the My friends series, is writing in secret. Set in a Lowland town, they are generally considered less successful than the Reachfar books.

Duncan's later novels, with the children's stories which she wrote for, and fictionally about, her niece and nephews, were written at Jemimaville in Easter Ross, in the area of the original "Reachfar", where she lived from 1958 onwards. She died there on 20th October 1976.

Moira Burgess

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