Reappraising Jane Duncan: Sexuality, Race and Colonialism in the My Friends Novels by Rita Rippetoe (review)

Sexuality, race and colonialism are significant personal and political issues for contemporary society and culture, and hence, a concern for literary interrogation. Rita Rippetoe's monograph contextualises the works of Jane Duncan, an author neglected in many accounts of the overlapping genres of Scottish, literary, women's, and popular writing, against these key themes.

Jane Duncan (1910–1976) wrote a series of nineteen novels, the 'My Friend' series, published by Macmillan between 1959 and 1976. The series is a Künstlerroman that depicts, not always chronologically, the life of the narrator, Janet Sandison, in Scotland, England, and the West Indies. This representation of Janet's life strongly corresponds with Duncan's own, although Duncan preferred that her books be read as fiction.

This monograph is divided into two parts. 'Part I: Jane Duncan: The Writer and Her Work' consists of biographical and thematic essays (pp. 5–116). In addition to the sexuality, race, and colonialism of the title, the themes in Part I cover women's work, geographic identity, class, and disability. Part I concludes with a review of the critical reception previously afforded to Duncan. 'Part II: Guides to the Novels' contains summaries of each novel in the series, followed by lists of characters and locales for each (pp. 117–69). One appendix gives sketches of 'major' characters; a second appendix lists some of the Scots vocabulary used in Duncan's writing.

The biographical account of Duncan's familial background and personal development as an author provides a backdrop to the autobiographical elements of the novels. One of the biographical instances to which Rippetoe returns in the essays is the publication order of the 'My Friends' novels, changed by her publisher from Duncan's original conception. This initiates a repetitive note, given limited discussion of the effect of this change on the reading experience of the novels.

Rippetoe presents the 'My Friend' novels through exploration of her themes to delineate the novels' worth as exemplars of character-driven popular fiction (pp. 1–2). Each essay extracts specific examples relating to the theme, supported by contextual information, interspersed and concluded with slight analytical moments. While this approach is successful for a single essay, it creates a further sense of repetition upon reading the whole when similar description from the novels recurs across the essays.

There are gaps in Rippetoe's extracts of incidents demonstrating Duncan's conveyance of those themes. For example, in '"Love Is the Law": Sexuality and Convention' (pp. 10–25), Rippetoe does not include one character's explicit textual denial of lesbian feeling in a scene in My Friend Monica, a surprising omission in a discussion of multiple heterosexual and homosexual characterisation in men and women in these novels.

Rippetoe's contexts include, for example, brief outlines of changes in UK (and Scottish) laws relating to divorce and homosexuality, and breakdowns of the many essential tasks that women performed on Highland crofts. The portrayal of Scotland as the most oppressed 'internal colony' of England [sic], uncomplicated by Scottish participation in British imperialism, is less convincing, and is particularly troubling in a short discussion of nineteenth-century famine that makes no mention of Ireland (pp. 82–83, 85). Neither is post-colonialism introduced as a further interpretive development in the essays on race or empire.

Rippetoe does provide some elegant analysis, such as her description of a character, once a professional ballet dancer, performing a 'full-body prestidigitation' to hide the fact that he now has prosthetic legs (p. 95). Yet the analysis is often stymied by this single theoretical approach. For example, for Rippetoe, a character's by-name, unpleasant to contemporary sensibilities, indicates the character holds a forever 'foreign' status to the Highland community, and is not interpreted as a symbolic integration never bestowed upon 'townie' incomers (pp. 56, 99). The memory-loss of one character is treated solely as a matter of illness and disability, and not...