In 1972, Jane Duncan, our two daughters, and their mother stood in our New England kitchen reminiscing about a visit to Jane's Friendly Shop in Cromarty. The girls were remembering jellies and jams made by Jane and the local women for whom the tiny coffee shop provided pin money. This memory moved our daughters back in time to their grandmother's currant jelly, so translucently clear that it reminded them of rubies. Their grandmother's daughter took another memory step backward to a vivid image, in her childhood home, of a kettle with a tall, upright arm and ring, from which hung a mash of fruit in a funnel-shaped bag. As the essence of the fruit dripped slowly through the cloth, no one was to go near this contraption, to touch or, heaven forbid, to squeeze it, for then the final product would be cloudy. ‘Sometimes,’ said Jane with a mischievous smile, ‘I squeeze the jelly bag’.

We have long puzzled over Jane Duncan's figurative squeezing of the jelly bag in her creative process. Along with her worldwide family of readers, we have wondered what is fact, fiction, or myth, particularly in the relation of her fictional ‘I’, Janet Sandison, to her actual life and self. Endless inquiries finally led Jane to clear this cloudiness in her autobiography Letter from Reaehfar (1975). She quotes Boris Pasternak: ‘facts don't exist until man puts into them something of his own … willful, human genius - of fairy tale or myth.’ To this she adds: ‘Well, my books are the “something of my own.” … All those people I knew were facts but I hope … I have put something of my own into what I have written of them so that, now, they have something of the quality of myth.’ Uncle George, her acknowledged inspiration as a storyteller, had his own name for it: ‘In spite of George's pronouncement that I am the biggest liar in the country, I try not to “lie” in my writing … I fictionalise my own experience’ (Letter, pp. 140, 151, 108). In the three sections that follow, we hope to explore this process and discuss a few of its more striking results.