Violet Jacob
Violet Jacob (1863-1946), née Erskine-Kennedy, was born in Montrose, where her family owned the house of Dun. She married Arthur Otway Jacob in 1894 and in 1895, after the birth of their son Harry, they were stationed in Mhow, a cantonment near Indore in India. During the five years that they spent in Mhow, Jacob explored the surrounding country on horseback alone or with friends, and collected botanical specimens that she subsequently sketched or painted. She wrote to her mother, “I could wander forever about this Indian country. With all its drawbacks it is the most congenial environment to me that I have ever been in” (61). It was also while in Mhow that Jacob began work on her first novel, The Sheep-Stealers (1902).
Upon their return, Jacob and her husband settled in Wales, her mother’s birth-country, and the region in which The Sheep-Stealers and The History of Aythan Waring (1908) are set. Like Jacob’s last and most famous novel, Flemington (1911), these earlier works are adventure stories that employ the conventions developed by Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling to describe intrigue in Britain’s Celtic peripheries. Like most adventure stories of this time, Jacob’s took daring young men as their protagonists, and it is telling that after the death of her son at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, she wrote no more novels.
However, she did continue to write poetry in vernacular Scots, and short stories, many of which are set in and around Montrose. Today she is celebrated primarily for her work in these genres and for Flemington, a novel about loyalty and betrayal set during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. After her husband’s death in 1936, Jacob returned to Scotland and settled in Kirriemuir.
Bibliography
Carol Anderson, “Debateable Land: The Prose Work of Violet Jacob,” in Tea and Leg Irons: New Feminist Readings from Scotland (London: Open Letters, 1992), pp. 31-44.
Carol Anderson, “Tales of her own Countries: Violet Jacob,” in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 347-
Joy Hendry, “Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing: the Nest of Singing Birds,” The History of Scottish Literature, vol. 4, ed. Cairns Craig (Aberdeen: ;Aberdeen University Press, 1987), pp. 291-308.