Reappraising Jane Duncan: Sexuality, Race and Colonialism in the My Friends Novels

Can a novelist that the Times described as “”enchanting”” in her portrayal of a young girl and her family in a small Highland village reveal greater depths? Below the surface of Jane Duncan’s Friends series deeper themes are at play in the nineteen novels. Alert readers will discover feminist motifs, a wide-ranging examination of women’s education and work in the twentieth century, a woman’s view of the rising tensions of the 1920s and 30s, and an outsider’s view of the racial tensions in the soon-to-be-independent West Indies. Duncan’s characters run the gamut from drunken tinkers to rigidly respectable Lowland housewives; from Irish miners to members of the London fast set; from English marchionesses to the semi-aristocratic plantocracy of the West Indies, all portrayed with telling detail. While the postwar Angry Young Men monopolized the attention of the publishing establishment, literary critics and academics dismissed the Friends novels as lightweight. Though out of print for decades Duncan’s works continued to be sought out and read by loyal fans.Two of the novels have been reprinted since the anniversary of her birth in 2010, while eBooks have made the series available to a new generation of readers and scholars ready to celebrate a charming and perceptive recorder of the great changes that the Great Britain underwent in the past century.