The finest works by Scottish author Jessie Kesson are being republished. Kesson, whose upbringing in Elgin was hard, spent some of her childhood in care. She began writing for the BBC after encouragement from Nan Shepherd and Neil Gunn, and when she moved to London with her husband in 1947 become a prodigious radio producer. She will be best remembered for her own works, however. Her most popular novel is the autobiographical The White Bird Passes (1958). This was followed by Glitter of Mica (1963), Another Time, Another Place (1983), and Where the Apple Ripens (1985). Kesson died in 1994.

Kesson's 1983 novel, Another Time, Another Place, plunges the reader into the world of a disconsolate crofter’s young wife when Italian prisoners of war are housed in the bothy next door. It was dramatised by director Michael Radford in a film starring Phyllis Logan, Giovanni Mauriello and Denise Coffey. The new edition includes an introduction by distinguished novelist Candia McWilliam, which provides illuminating insight into both the novel's terrain, and Jessie Kesson's own life story. It is exclusively reprinted here.

Introduction to Another Time, Another Place

by Candia McWilliam

JESSIE Kesson was born Jessie Grant McDonald in October 1916 in the Inverness Workhouse – a bastard girl-child come into life in the middle of a catastrophic war to a mother who was intermittently drunk and intermittently offering herself for money (what you might call making ends meet in a hard time when the devil drove). She was a writer of great responsive natural talent and lifelong close-exercised artistic discipline. It was her gift to pursue what she refers to her novel in Another Time, Another Place as the "serious search of laughter’s source". As always with this writer, when dealing with what is serious, her approach is glancing not insistent.

That innate talent, it seems clear, derived in no small part from her mother, who was full with remembered poetry and song, who knew the names of what she saw in nature all around her and her daughter, and from whom Jessie was taken away at the age of 10, on grounds of neglect, to be placed in Proctor’s Orphan Training Home at Skene in Aberdeenshire, the first and not the worst of such institutions in which she was to be held. It is not surprising that the theme that sings loudest throughout her work is imprisonment – of various circumstantial and psychological kinds. Like a run of closed doors in a corridor in a bad dream, her work evokes various forms of this: the feeling of being trapped; exclusion from insular human communities; being met with a closed mind; facing psychological manipulation and control. Glimpsed beyond this claustrophobic world, however, her work also shows the converse – a world of warmth, love and of art itself. This world is aquiver with life, desire and hope, like the light on the back of a gull in a lowering black sky, the starry pale bramble flowers in a dark hedge or indeed "the glitter of mica" in stern north-east Scots stone (the phrase used for the title of another Jessie Kesson novel in 1963).

Jessie was denied higher education on account of her perceived station in life. Such an orphan, female at that, would be presumed to be destined for work as either a domestic servant or a farm worker. Such is the barely examined, soppy-stern notion of "to be cruel to be kind", which is, in our own time, mealy-mouthedly designated as "management of expectation".

This exclusion from the education that her mind and her spirit deserved was yet another insult to her consciousness as well as her intelligence, in a life already roughly shaken by constant upheavals and slammed by loss upon loss. She had a breakdown and was institutionalised again, this time in the mental hospital in Aberdeen. She married John Kesson in 1937 and worked with him as a farm worker, a cottar-wife, in north-east Scotland. Their labour was subject to the need or whim of the presiding farmer or landowner and they were susceptible to being sold to the lowest bidder. There was no domestic security and the houses needed not be more than barely habitable by profitable beast rather than transient man.

Throughout, Kesson’s work retrieves lightness and air from within the weightiest, most soul-extinguishing of repetitive experience. The effect of her understanding as to how to space the notes of her observations, and of recalled and summoned emotion, paced along the stave of feeling, is that the reader may take seriously the scoring she offers when it comes to an understanding of time itself; time – that is perhaps the most difficult of all the many kinds of fiction, although it may be the only certain truth we know at the level of the cell. It is with her art as with the scone-making in Another Time, Another Place:

"She would miss Elspeth’s friendship. Elspeth who had tried to initiate her into the strange ways of this new life. Who had taught her to bake. Conjuring up a living entity out of a raw ingredient. ‘Lightly now – lightly. That scones [sic] will never rise. Thumping away at the dough like that. Leave it now. Let it alone. For the love of goodness. Give the dough a chance to breathe ..."

It is not surprising that in her work she consistently makes time for "ootlins" – an Aberdeenshire word that describes those who are outside the pack, overlooked or forgotten in some way different or "other" – since who, in fact, is not an ootlin, or at least has may be considered to be one, merely by being translated to another time, another place?

This short novel casts a spell reminiscent in technique of two other female writers of different nationality and extraction, but of similarly intense and original art: Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson. They also tested the connective and quickening limits of punctuation, and the creative possibilities of omission. All ask the reader to trust their very particular rhythm and to consider what they imply when they leave details out. Kesson’s high discipline and clean technique allow and "train" the capacity of her reader to feel her protagonists’ pain, fear or heartbreak freshly, as in life, and not to become dulled by iteration or insistence. It is risky but is successful because the novel is wholly devoid of cheap intent or vulgar effect. She mobilises innocence while swerving naivety.

The novel is in command of itself in terms of art, completely, while it deals with the consequences of an apparent lack of command over the self. The plot is about forbidden desire across time and place and it is set in time of war. The unities and verities are eternal, straight and remorseless. Very few writers indeed can capture the drive to outlawed or forbidden desire as Kesson can. Her technique is a matter of breath, anticipation, suspension of the reader’s conscript imagination and the increasingly – or so we understand the lovers to feel – relentless drive to consummation. This drive is shared, we come to feel, by all created nature, from the rolling seasons of the year to the last dusk-fuming bluebell and tender-horned snail. The whole, almost formally choreographic sense of suspension, teases us – nearly, almost, just-not and barely at all, and then, actually, something happens – or does it?

In this novel, Jessie Kesson adds to the classical device of pathetic fallacy the forces of the farming year (rich in metaphors of fertility that must at all costs avoid the tumescent silliness of Cold Comfort Farm) in order to achieve her artistic goal. She evokes the trembling short beauty of those seasons when north-east Scotland responds to the brief attentions of the sun and comes forth in flower and scent, as opposed to the fabled grape-hung south whence come the alluring, dangerous, despised prisoners of war from Italy who glow in Another Time, Another Place with longing for home, for sun, for heat and, all but impersonally, for contact with a woman.

That there is something impersonal in the sense of circling and parried desire adds to the crisis of the novel. The act that proves so ruinous, that confirms and worsens the trap in which the young woman at the novel’s heart finds herself, isn’t that important. It’s as real in contemplation as in enactment, it’s plural and it is, crucially, shadowed by a version of itself.

The situational trap becomes a moral trap, moved along with the virtuosic sleight of hand by which a ship might be introduced into a bottle – an image that is offered to us with breathtaking delicacy at the book’s close (which is nothing so limiting as a conclusion). Kesson reproduces the morbidities of a closed society, the septic nature of prejudice and of self-feeding rumour, and the fearful judgmental conclusions and failures of mercy by whose habitual use people prop themselves up in order to be seen to manage to stand upright in relation to one another, forgetting that, just a few degrees around their back, the workings show and we are seen as we are – but stooks of straw.

A stark drollness lies behind the punitive tasks of the farm, the rotten tatties and back-breaking neeps, the befriended hens it seems unkind to eat after developing acquaintance, the duties and rare tense occasions of mirth, the vegetable show or the harvest home. In the words of one of Kesson’s tragically suffering yet richly individuated protagonists, you’re better off "dead than missing. You know where you are when you’re dead".

Another Time, Another Place works like a ballad and, like a ballad, it stays in the blood as well as in the mind, as the poems and songs of the mother of this rare writer abided in her own blood and mind to become her vivid coloured art.

The White Bird Passes, with introduction by Linda Cracknell, Glitter of Mica, with introduction by Jenni Fagan, and Another Time, Another Place, with introduction by Candia McWilliam, are published by Black & White, £7.99 each