Jane Findlater

Background

Jane Findlater was born in Edinburgh but the first twenty years of her life were spent in Lochearnhead where her father was minister of the Free Church of Scotland.

Career

They are known for their collaborative works of fiction as well as their own individual writing. Sometimes they are referred to as the Findlater sisters. Their close relationship was of great importance to them, and continued for their entire lives.

They were taught by governesses, including Annie Lorrain Smith before she trained as a botanist, listened to stories told by family, friends and servants, and started writing from an early age, both together and individually.

lieutenant was ten years before Jane"s book The Green Graves of Balgowrie, inspired by her mother"s family history, struck a chord with both the general reader and the critics. lieutenant had been written on grocer"s paper.

Its success brought both freedom from financial worry and also literary acclaim. After a few years they moved south in search of a warmer climate for their mother"s health.

From then until the outbreak of World War I, the sisters published a series of novels, including their co-authored work, and two collaborations with Kate Douglas Wiggin and Allan McAulay (pseudonym of Charlotte Stewart).

Both sisters" work shows an attention to the details of everyday life, including its pleasures, combined with a sense of the restricted opportunities for women in around the start of the 20th century Scotland. Jane"s book The Ladder to the Stars (1906) was less well-received than The Green Graves, because of its focus on women"s personal freedom. The heroine is "wholly absorbed in the cultivation of Self", according to one reviewer.

Crossriggs (1908), often considered the sisters" best collaborative work, widely read in its day and republished in 1986, is just one of the books in which they reject "the idea that a single life is a wasted life".

This nicely observed picture of village life, while telling stories of love, also explores "the lonely situation of an articulate and emotional woman" for whom marriage is not the answer. In the 1920s their work seemed old-fashioned and Beneath the Visiting Moon (1923) was their last book

They moved from Devon to Rye on the Sussex coast and, for World World War II safety, back to Perthshire in 1940. Their writing in partnership is often considered their best work, outshining their individual novels.

The Affair at the Inn.

Connections

Friend:

Ellen Terry