Lairds of Dun, with a sense of wonder and respect, of ‘that partly discovered and partly undiscovered country, the world that was’. Imaginatively compelled by the past, Jacob locates many of her short stories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with others set closer to her own age; like many Scottish writers from Scott to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, desiring to record a world that was passing, Jacob vividly recreates societies just slipping from view. Sometimes there are references to real people and events, but this is art, not history, and these are carefully crafted stories. In some, like ‘The Fiddler’, there are tales within tales, where one time period provides the framework, enclosing memories of another, implying strong bonds between past and present. Elsewhere landscape suggests a sense of the deeper past, bringing intimations of mortality: ‘on her left the sea lay cold and hidden by the dunes along the shore. Its voice, like the voice of a shell held to the ear, had the breath of a far away history reaching from childhood to death, from time to the end of time’ (‘The Lum Hat’).
Violet Jacob delineates little-recognised places and their too easily-forgotten histories; but these stories are also, importantly, portraits of people. Jacob refers in one tale to those who have ‘marginal sketches on the maps of their minds; unofficial scraps which give outside points of view’ (‘The Overthrow of Adam Pitcaithley’), and her own work might be seen in this light. Like James Joyce in Dubliners (1914), Jacob illustrates lives ‘outside’ the fashionable world; lives that might be seen as obscure, sometimes frustrated. Although the writer herself came from an ancient landed family, her work depicts characters of various social classes. Many are poor working people: farm-labourers and servants, quiet young men, solitary shepherds and strong-willed country-women such as the spirited, red-haired Euphemia in the story of that name, or Auntie Thompson with her ‘large, determined pink face’. These people are given voice, and the splendid dialogue in the vernacular is cannily deployed, the minister in ‘The Fiddler’, for instance, lapsing into Scots only at moments of high emotion.
Jacob’s characters are often ‘marginal’ figures within communities, like Phemie Moir in ‘The Fiddler’, or Annie Cargill, ‘just a lassie’ to the men who dismiss her memory, her grave bearing ‘no date, no text, not the baldest record’. These women have sad fates, though others survive, like Jessie-Mary, the orphan in ‘The Debatable Land’, who escapes into the free ‘no-man’s land’, departing at the end with a passing tinker. Such figures, anticipatory of Jessie Kesson’s outsiders or ‘ootlins’, tend to be sympathetically represented, even if not all (Janet Robb in ‘Thievie’, for instance) are wholly likeable, and some, like the sheepstealer in ‘The Watch-Tower’, are lawbreakers. Their plight is human, and touching. ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’ is moving especially because the focus is on a couple whose lives – and love – are not the stuff of conventional romance. These small Angus communities themselves might seem odd or unimportant if viewed from a distant perspective, like that of the visiting Englishman in ‘The Fiddler’, but are rendered significant by a writer dwelling on their particularities.
There are reminders of a larger context, though any assumption of its superiority is undermined. In ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’, Hedderwick’s son Robert ‘who was apprenticed to a watch-maker in Dundee, came home at intervals to spend Sunday with his father and to impress the parish with that knowledge of men and matters which he believed to be the exclusive possession of dwellers in manufacturing towns’. But wealth, if not wisdom, does tend to exist elsewhere; like Lewis Grassic Gibbon writing a little later, Jacob notes the diaspora of poor rural folk to Canada and America. Fortunes earned by those who have lighted out for ‘the colonies’ are key to the plots of ‘Auntie Thompson’ and ‘Thievie’. And those who lead wandering lives are contrasted in Jacob’s fiction with narrower, staider folk, like Malvina Birse (in ‘The Figurehead’) or genteel Christina Mills, of whom we learn that the sea-captain and the gipsy woman ‘touched some sleeping thing in her mind which feared to be awakened’. Freedom and constraint are recurring concerns.
The boundaries of human life themselves are not absolute. Just as Jacob’s poetry hints at a liminal realm where the living and the dead meet, so does her short fiction allude to ‘those fringes of spiritual life that surround humanity’ (‘A Middle-Aged Drama’). As in many ballads and folk tales, figures from beyond the grave visit the human world: Annie Cargill appears to an elderly man who once abandoned her; a yellow dog (unlike the faithful cur in Flemington) may be a supernatural being presaging, perhaps bringing, death. This concern with the supernatural links Jacob’s short stories with those of Scott and Hogg, Margaret Oliphant, Stevenson and her contemporary, John Buchan. like several of these Scottish writers she uses Scots powerfully, and is able to create a sense of ambiguity and the presence of something like evil.
There is a toughness and vigour to Jacob’s shorter fiction, which is at its best both symbolic and realist. In ‘Thievie’ the stormy elements parallel a woman’s desperation and growing anger, while the story also offers a sharp analysis of her social and economic entrapment. In a telling scene in ‘A Middle-Aged Drama’ a woman sees from the church window ‘a shambling figure that moved among the graves’; it appears her past is returning to haunt her, ‘a long-buried tragedy … being revived’, but here death paradoxically brings new life. Although many of these stories deal with death, violence, sometimes madness, melodrama is counterbalanced by glimmers of hope and love, and by Jacob’s characteristically understated prose.
Satirical observation especially of socially aspiring and snobbish characters runs throughout Jacob’s work; the come-uppance of Isa MacAndrew and her family in ‘The Disgracefulness of Auntie Thompson’ is one enjoyable example. The reverse side of romance is exposed, too, attitudes to marriage revealed with dry irony; in ‘The Lum Hat’, we learn of Uncle Halket, who has remarried after his wife’s death, that ‘he had no ill-will at Isabella but he had liked her predecessor better’, while the sea-captain Baird ‘did not want a wife with a vivid personality who might be likely to get into mischief whilst he was at sea’. The portrait of Christina Mills is presented by a cool, detached narrator, but ‘The Lum Hat’ itself is not lacking in vigour. It is, like much of Jacob’s fiction, notable for a relative frankness about sex. Women can be lusty: ‘“Baird’s the lad I’d take”’ declares’a woman over eighty’, though Christina, well-read in the ‘decorous books of her day’, shrinks from the advances of the strongly physical sea-captain. There are many memorable and suggestive visual images: a church tower Christina imagines falling on her when she meets Baird, a woman selling brooms, the brawny ship’s figurehead of a ship called Sirius after the Greek-named ‘hot and scorching’ dog-star.
Christina receives from her other suitor, Aeneas, a picture of St Cecilia playing a musical instrument; it is unstated, yet significant, that St Cecilia is patron saint also of the blind:
She [Christina] strolled between town and sea. On her right hand the tall, beautiful steeple of the parish kirk held its flying buttresses against the sky and over the roofs crowded below it. The sun was near the horizon and the smoke from many chimneys, the varied skyline with its slopes and steepnesses and angles, caught the smouldering sundown and became welded into one vision of romance like the embodiment of the soul of a town. Christina saw nothing of these things.
This strongly visual passage is brilliantly undercut by that last sentence, summing up Christina’s fatal limitation. A sensitivity to the visual is often a mark of the imaginative or idealistic character in Jacob’s work; Tom Falconer in ‘The Figurehead’, for instance, like Archie in Flemington, sees ‘in pictures’. Poor Christina is found wanting. Yet we can feel compassion for her, for ironically – and chillingly – it is a visual image which finally turns her from making what might have been a happier second marriage: the sight of the tall man’s hat worn by her father, so richly emblematic of the forces of class, convention and gender, which gives this remarkable tale its title.
Jacob’s own fiction is strongly pictorial, as might be expected of a writer who was also a gifted painter (a few of her attractive paintings and sketches of Angus can be seen at the House of Dun and in Montrose Museum: cottages at Ferryden,
