Kesson, Jessie 1916-1994
(Jessie Grant Macdonald)

PERSONAL:

Born Jessie Grant Macdonald, October 29, 1916, in Inverness, Scotland; died September 26, 1994, in London, England; married Johnny Kesson, 1934; children: Kenny, Avril.

CAREER:

Writer. During early career, worked various odd jobs, including as a domestic servant, social worker, artist's model, cleaning woman, and farmer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

LL.D., University of Aberdeen, 1988.

WRITINGS:

The White Bird Passes (novel), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1958.

Glitter of Mica (novel), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1963.

Another Time, Another Place (novel), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1983.

Where the Apple Ripens, and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1985.

Jessie Kesson: An Omnibus (contains The White Bird Passes, Glitter of Mica, Where the Apple Ripens,and Another Time, Another Place), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1991, also published asThe Jessie Kesson Omnibus.

A Jessie Kesson Companion, edited by Isabel Murray, B&W (Edinburgh, Scotland), 2000, also published as Somewhere Beyond.

Also author of over ninety plays for radio and television. Contributor to Three's Company: A Collection of Stories from Aberdeen, Keith Murray Publications (Aberdeen, Scotland), 1989.

ADAPTATIONS:

Another Time, Another Place was adapted to film by Mike Radford, Embassy Home Entertainment, 1985.

SIDELIGHTS:

Although Jessie Kesson ultimately became one of her native Scotland's most beloved authors, the road to that success proved long and hard for her. She was the daughter of a prostitute, and her grandparents were so ashamed that they forbade the young Jessie to use her first name, which was the same as her grandmother's. After her mother died of syphilis in 1945, she was sent to an orphanage. When she became an adult, she worked in a variety of meaningless and mundane jobs to earn a living. A chance meeting with the author Nan Shepard changed Kesson's life. Encouraged by the writer, she began to try her hand at stories and poems. She published her first poem in 1940 and also won a short storycompetition. Invited to write for the British Broadcasting Corp., she would go on to write dozens of plays for the broadcaster.

Moving to London in 1947, she continued to write for radio and television, and by 1958 was publishing her first novels. The White Bird Passes tells the story of young Janie and her struggle to survive the slums of Elgin while also dealing with her separation from her mother. A Listener critic commented that "her finest work is still to be found in this autobiographical novel." Kesson herself was not of the same opinion, however. As she told Isobel Murray in Scottish Writers Talking, "The only ane ([one]) I really feel sadly a bit uncomfortable about is The White Bird Passes. … For the simple reason is—it was the easiest book I ever wrote."

Kesson preferred her next book, Glitter of Mica,because it is the least autobiographical. Set in the hard-scrabble farmland of rural Scotland, which Kesson knew intimately, it illustrates the utter dependence of the laborers on the local farmer, who might or might not invite a farmhand to "bide on" for another year in late March or early April. In addition to the uncertain offers of farm work, the people in rural Scotland also deal with the pressures to conform to the rigid Calvinist orthodoxies, including sexual repression.

The conflict between inner longings and societal pressures are also central in Kesson's Another Time, Another Place. Set during World War II, it tells of a lonely farm wife named Janie, who finds her world-view shaken when the government places three Italian POWs in the house next door. Learning to see her home through their eyes, Janie becomes dissatisfied with her rural isolation and grinding poverty, feeling like a prisoner herself. "With consummate ease and modesty Kesson creates the universal from these particulars; her portrait of this tiny, remote, working world, brightened by language, balanced by first-hand knowledge, fastens on the mind like a fish hook," wrote New Statesman reviewer Grace Ingoldby.

Kesson's final publication before her death was the collection Where the Apple Ripens, and Other Stories.Alison Fell, writing in the New Statesman, described it as "a selection of intense, partial, shimmering views of rural Scotland, where sensuality wars against Calvinism with an energy proportional to the force of the repression." In these stories, a young woman faces unwanted pregnancy, a young man is falsely accused of rape, and older characters face the unpleasant prospect of living out their lives alone. "Despite an underlying pathos," commented Peter L. Robertson inBooklist, "Kesson's fiction has warmth and a wry wit."

Such lonely characters inhabiting the fringes of society are common in Kesson's fiction. As she told Murray in her Scottish brogue, "That's really what everything I've ever written is aboot—queer fowk! … Queer fowk, who are oot, and niver hiv ony desire to be in!"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Murray, Isobel, editor, Scottish Writers Talking, Tuckwell Press (East Lothian, England), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1987, Peter L. Robertson, review of Where the Apple Ripens, and Other Stories,p. 981.

Listener, October 15, 1987, review of The White Bird Passes, p. 28.

New Statesman, August 5, 1983, Grace Ingoldby, "Worlds Apart," review of Another Time, Another Place, p. 24; August 8, 1986, Alison Fell, review of Where the Apple Ripens, and Other Stories,p. 29.