Scottish Authors > Violet Jacob Novelist, Poet, Short story writer & Diarist 1863-1946

Violet Jacob was born Violet Kennedy-Erskine in 1863 at the House of Dun, her family's home near Montrose, now owned by the National Trust for Scotland ("Balnillo House" in her novel Flemington). The Erskine family history, which also fed into her fiction, was recorded by Jacob in The Lairds of Dun (1931). In 1894 she married Arthur Jacob, an Irishman serving in the British Army, and they went with his regiment to Central India. Violet Jacob's Diaries and letters from India 1895-1900 were published in 1990, illustrated with Jacob's own watercolours. the Jacobs were stationed for a time in Egypt, then lived in various parts of England, notably Shropshire and Herefordshire.

Jacob, whose mother was Welsh, set her first serious fictional work The Sheepstealers (1902) in the Welsh borders. This novel was well-received as was her next, the Angus-based The Interloper (1904), with its excellent Scots dialogue. In both works Jacob's prose is characteristically vivid and economical. Violet Jacob wrote books for children and several historical romances, but her most significant achievement is Flemington (1911; republished 1994). Set around the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, this novel dealing with loyalty and betrayal can be placed in a tradition running through Scott and Stevenson. Archie Flemington, a young portrait painter and government agent, faces moral and emotional dilemmas when spying on James Logie, a Jacobite, who confides his own tragic history, and Archie, horrified:

... looked round at the shortening shadows and into the stir of coming sunlight as a man looks round for a door through which to escape from impending stress. He, who was always ready to go forward, recoiled because of what he saw in himself.

Archie finds himself torn between betraying James or his own political and family allegiances. Located on the symbolically suggestive landscapes of Angus, this novel, interweaving public and private history, is tragic and moving although lightened, like all Jacob's prose, by wit and dry humour. Jacob also published some fine short stories, mainly in Tales of my own country (1922), and The Lum hat and other stories: last tales of Violet Jacob, edited by Roland Garden, which appeared posthumously in 1982. Better known is Jacob's Scots vernacular poetry, in Songs of Angus (1915), More songs of Angus (1918), Bonnie Joan and other poems (1921), The Northern Lights and other poems (1927), and collected in The Scottish poems of Violet Jacob (1944). Her poems appeared in Hugh MacDiarmid's Northern numbers (1920-21) and John Buchan's The Northern muse (1924). Recent critics appreciate the serious and radical as well as the sentimental elements in her poetry, which draws on ballad and folk song. Tam i' the kirk is often anthologised, but poems like The Baltic, Craigo Woods, The Jaud and The End o't are also interesting. The Wild geese has been set to music by Jim Reid.

The heaviest blow in Violet Jacob's life was the loss of her only son, Harry (born 1895), at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. After her husband's death in 1937, Jacob returned to Angus where she died in 1946, having received an honorary degree from Edinburgh University in the previous year.

Carol Anderson

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