Jane Duncan was the pseudonym of Scottish writer Elizabeth Jane Cameron, best known for her My Friends series of semi-autobiographical novels.
Background
Elizabeth Jane Cameron was born in Renton, West Dunbartonshire on 10 March 1910 and brought up in the Scottish Lowlands where her father was a police officer, attending Lenzie Academy in the area of Lenzie, East Dunbartonshire, but much of her childhood was spent in the Highlands on the Black Isle in Easter Ross, on her grandparents" croft "The Colony" (the "Reachfar" of her novels).
Education
She graduated in English from the University of Glasgow and did various secretarial jobs before serving as a Flight Officer (Intelligence), WAAF during World World War II alongside the choreographer Frederick Ashton.
Career
She afterwards lived in Jamaica for ten years, returning to Jemimaville, near "The Colony", in 1958 as a widow. In 1959 Duncan became something of a publishing sensation when Macmillan Publishers announced that it would be publishing seven of her manuscripts, the first to be produced being My Friends the Mission Boyds. The nineteenth and last of the series, My Friends George and Tom, was published in 1976.
The biographical background to her writing is given in her (1975) ().
In her later years she lived in Jemimaville in the Scottish Highlands, where she wrote her later novels. She died there on 20 October 1976.
To mark the centenary of Jane Duncan"s birth, Millrace Books have re-published My Friends the Mission Boyds. The new edition of My Friends the Mission Boyds was launched at Waterstone’s in Inverness on Thursday 24 June 2010.