Jessie Kesson died in September 1994 without having published an autobiography announced as forthcoming in 1981. What we know about her life is mainly gathered from her fictions, always a highly risky process, or from a number of interviews which tend to be full of meat but lacking in chronology. She was bom illegitimate in the Workhouse in Inverness in 1916, and lived in Elgin with her mother, who was not the prostitute of popular myth but rather ‘an enthusiastic amateur’. She was separated from her mother who had fallen ill with a contracted disease, and sent to an orphanage at Skene, in Aberdeenshire, aged nine. After doing well at school she was not allowed to proceed to university, because the Orphanage Trustees thought education would be wasted on a girl. She never ceased to regret and resent this.

Subsequently she was diagnosed as neurasthenic, and she spent a year in a mental hospital, another of a series of gifted women, from Florence Nightingale and Beatrice Webb to her personal heroine Virginia Woolf, who suffered in the attempt to express their talents in the male-determined world they found themselves in. She then met and married her husband Johnnie (who died in 1994). She began her first career, as cottar wife. Encouraged by novelist Nan Shepherd, she began to write for magazines, and features and plays for radio, for the BBC in Aberdeen and the Scottish Home Service. After she and Johnnie moved to London with their family, she had an extraordinary range of jobs. As well as writing radio plays for the newly instituted Third Programme, she cooked and cared for old folk, did psychodrama with disturbed teenagers, hoovered a cinema at Palmer's Green and cleaned a nurses’ home at Colney Hatch. She was by turns teacher, social worker, artist's model and radio producer: small wonder she wryly called the projected autobiography Mistress of None.

She published four volumes of fiction, all slim, at intervals of many years. None appeared before she was over forty: The White Bird Passes (1958), Glitter of Mica (1963), Another Time, Another Place (1983) and Where the Apple Ripens, published in 1985 and containing a novella first published in 1978 and a number of previously published short stories.