Reappraising Jane Duncan

<p> Scottish novelist Jane Duncan's semiautobiographical <I>My Friends</I> series was dismissed by postwar critics as lightweight at a time when a coterie of angry young men monopolized the attention of the British publishing establishment. Yet deeper themes are at play in the 19 novels. Modern readers will recognize feminist motifs a wide-ranging examination of women's education and work in the 20th century a woman's view of the rising societal tensions of the 1920s and 1930s and an outsider's perspective on the racial divide in the soon-to-be-independent West Indies.</p><p> This book explores Duncan's body of work out of print for decades though sought by loyal fans. Her characters run the gamut--drunken tinkers Lowland housewives Irish miners members of the London fast set and English marchionesses all portrayed with telling detail. Her novels--two of them recently reprinted for a new generation--reveal a charming and perceptive recorder of the changes Great Britain underwent in the past century.</p>