An important poet and novelist in the Scottish modernist vernacular revival, Violet Jacob was respected by her literary contemporaries for creating some of the finest Scottish literature of her time. In the tradition of James Hogg, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson, her short fiction and novels portray passionate conflicts in carefully realized local settings, and her haunting, poetic evocations of northeastern Scottish dialect and characters witness her love of the landscape and culture of the region. New editions of two of her novels appeared in the 1990s, but more editions, a biography, and other correctives to the neglect she suffered in the last half of the twentieth century are long overdue.

Born in Angus on 1 September 1863, Violet Augusta Mary Fredericka Kennedy-Erskine was the second of four children of William Henry Kennedy-Erskine, the eighteenth Laird of Dun, and Catherine Kennedy-Erskine, née Jones, of Carmarthenshire, Wales...