Summary
The literary sensation of her day, Jane Duncan was a feisty free- spirited woman who lived by her own rules. Out of print for 40 years, only now is her voice is about to be heard again
SHE has the best of views in Kirkmichael Burial Ground, Jane Duncan. Her grave is not skulking in the cold shadow of the yew tree, nor hiding behind the ruins of the pre-Reformation church, now shored up with wooden supports to prevent imminent collapse. It's a panoramic vista from where she lies, out across the grey mudflats of Easter Ross's Udale Bay, where seabirds strut in water pools and the rusting hulks of oil rigs rise monstrously from the Firth.See the full content of this document
Extract
Friends in the North
Across the water curls the straggling line of houses that makes up the Black Isle village of Jemimaville where Duncan lived, her own house, The Old Store, visible from here on the cheek of the bay. And there is nothing, nothing at all in this still place, or that small village, to indicate that Jane Duncan was the literary sensation of her generation. Certainly not the simple granite gravestone, austere almost compared to some, falling forwards slightly towards the sea, its base bright with the stain of yellow lichen.
In 1959, the London publishing house of MacMillan was besieged by reporters interested in a new Scottish writer. Jane Duncan was making publishing history: MacMillan had bought no less than seven of her titles in one go. Duncan had been writing for years, burning many of her efforts before anyone read them, ...See the full content of this document
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