Jan Scott

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Jan Scott - gorgeous, glacial Sabrina Fair; psychopathically uninvolved?

I was reading The Cricket Term lately, and noticed particularly Jan's response to Nicola's attempt to thank her for having been kind when N is shocked by her mother's letter telling her she's possibly in her final term at Kingscote. Nicola says (again, I haven't got my copy to hand, so am not claiming accuracy)'Thanks, Jan [...] I know you don't like to be bothered.' Jan is portrayed as being genuinely bemused by this, as apparently she has been by various staff comments down the years to the effect that she is uncommitted, uninterested (plus a couple of adjectives I can't remember). Certainly, she is always portrayed as utterly neutral, apparently contentedly isolated, completely self-reliant. Is she really so unaware of her own effect, given that she is presented as an excellent reader of others, whether Lois's machinations, Nicola's sensibilities, or staff moods?

Also, do we intuit a subtext giving some context for Jan's isolation? I can't remember which novel includes the reminiscence about her refusal to do voluntary weeding and being marked down thereafter as an unco-operative type, but in Cricket Term we get Rowan's brief account of Jan's background (father a surgeon in Lincolnshire, presumably why he doesn't attend the play, leaving Jan to talk briefly to Rowan and make her 'unobtrusive exit') and her apparent motherlessness, with the possibility that the absent mother is not dead but Mad or Criminal, or Adulterously Elsewhere? (A propos of not much, AF can be rather harsh on mothers - Esther's is 'no nicer than Nicola expected', Helena Merrick is a cypher, also disliked by N, Edward Oeschli's mother doesn't come up trumps, Miranda is dubious about her mother, Pam Marlow is another cypher, and Madame Orly is from hell...)

In a set of novels full of characters getting madly involved in everything from the tidiness picture to the diving cup, and where people are continually looking at lists to see if they're in plays or on teams, the only other character who at all resembles Jan for uninvolvement is Latimer, the gorgeous Jersey cow, too lesirely to scold, but both are depicted as admirable.

Anyway, thoughts on Jan?

Comments

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

Patrick is also uninvolved - remember at the start of Attic Term when he's talking to Ginty about school, and she says something like "but you are...in things, aren't you?" and he confesses that he has very little to do with anything school-related that's not compulsory.

But anyway. Jan Scott always reminded me of myself when I was at school - very aware that all this school-related malarkey was pretty small beans compared to the rest of life, and just quietly waiting it out until the fun stuff really got going.

[owl]

Patrick's uninvolvement might be just the awfulness of school, combined with his long absence after falling off the cliff, rather than his natural personality.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Yes, hard to know how much of his solitariness is down to being the Lone Trad at his 'progressive' Catholic school.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I loved Jan's adultness - she achieves when at school what Rowan - driving over for the Play - realises it's taken her a couple of terms out of school to work out, namely that it doesn't really matter. She's the anti-Lois because everyone remembers Lois minding dreadfully - and for the rest of their lives. And I think she'd actually be a very good solicitor, because you have to have a sort of detachment that both has you testing your client's story to the nth because actually they always do lie to you (I shocked the lass I share an office with by my scepticism about a client's story, and when she was sputtering I said casually "Do you let on to your doctor how much you drink?" and she came back "Of course not" (not that she drinks excessively by lawyer standards) before realising the point)and by going into bat the hardest you can because that's the job.

[owl]

Perhaps the difference between Jan and Rowan is that Rowan liked school, as far as we can tell, while Jan really isn't fussed.

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

I love Jan's adultness too, though in defence of Rowan, it takes an awful lot of people much longer than two terms to move on from school/college/the last workplace. On the subject of adultness, I have thought of posting a query about this topic: I do sometimes wonder whether AF makes her characters too adult, Tim (not your favourite character, I know!) seems to me to have very adult thought processes, Jan ditto, Nicola, though sometimes deliberately shown as childishly uncertain or naive, displays remarkable maturity in her captaining of her cricket team, while the Edward-lifting operation took a level of planning and nerve that I doubt many people of RAH Rowan and Giles' age possess. But then, maybe people of AF's generation/the generations she wrote about did just grow up faster.

On matters legal, I agree Jan has many qualities that make her very well-suited to the law, but from my modern-day perspective I think I almost see her more as a barrister than a solicitor. Given her intelligence and presence, I can't see her going to a high street firm/small provincial practice in this day and age, but her ability to realise that it doesn't really matter might well stand in the way of a truly successful career as a transaction lawyer. And also, in the kind of firms I know, it's not enough to be excellent, you have to really want it to make partner and I don't think we see signs of ambition in her underneath the detachment? Guess I could see her at a good litigation firm though.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

On matters legal, I agree Jan has many qualities that make her very well-suited to the law, but from my modern-day perspective I think I almost see her more as a barrister than a solicitor. Given her intelligence and presence, I can't see her going to a high street firm/small provincial practice in this day and age</>

She isn't in this day and age. When I read The Cricket Term it was the early 1970s (our library had a spanking new copy and I was lying on a sofa with a broken ankle reading it with my stamp the first in the book). That was in my second year at the Grammar School. When I was in the Lower Sixth there was a careers evening to which the parents (but not the girls) were invited. Parents - fathers, in fact, in each case - from various professions were there to talk about careers opportunities. And the barrister stood up and said that a girl would never get a pupillage, let alone a tenancy, and if she did she's never get any briefs, and the solicitior got up and said that unless she had a family firm to join no woman would ever be looked at and even if she was she'd end up doing family all her days, and the engineer got up and said Forget it and sat down again, and the accountant said, it's much more interesting than you might think, and you don't even have to be good at figures, and no-one cares about the sex thing at all, and actually it's all wonderful. And 30 of the 32 of us in the class came into school the next day having been told by our parents we should all be accountants.

Given AF actually lags a decade or so behind the publication date in the social attitude stake Jan is scarily up-to-date.

I think however in terms of the ability to organise that AF is going squarely with the "people in the Resistance at our age" view. Indeed, for Peter and Nick the instance in the lighthouse does mature them (Ginty regresses and Lawrie treats it as all fiction anyway)

[(Anonymous)]

She isn't in this day and age.

Oh, I know! For the time the book was set in, Jan was taking the only route available to her, and that was pretty adventurous. Admittedly, Arden LJ was called to to the Bar in 1971, a few years ahead of the book's publication, but it's not as though she's short of legal connections. It's just an idiosyncrasy of mine that I do always see time as fairly elastic in AF's books, partly due to the fact she adopted that dual timespan, partly because of the "people in the Resistance at our age" angle, and partly because the characters are so well-written they seem real, with the result I quite often try imagining them in this day and age. Hence the Jan comment.

I'm also influenced by the fact that from quite an early age I shared a career interest with Jan so, stupid as it sounds, always rather identified my ambitions with hers and vice versa. And I bet she'd look great in wig and gown.

for Peter and Nick the instance in the lighthouse does mature them

Although perhaps that's more apparent in the books "immediately" following THMATT ? By Attic Term and Run Away Home it doesn't seem so obvious. But that could be because they play a less primary role when they feature in those books.

PS Did your parents tell you to become an accountant after that Parents' Evening??

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

PS Did your parents tell you to become an accountant after that Parents' Evening?
Oh, yes. They told me it when they came back from the do when I was in bed. I told them to get lost, but it was only next day at school I realsied everyone had had the same interview.

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

sorry, that was me forgetting to log in.

[owl]

Besides, Rowan's been running the farm for the last year, and Giles has had his organising skillz honed by the Navy.

Isn't Peter repressing the Traitor events to some extent? I should think Nick has the best response, but Peter's still ahead of Ginty. Is anything ever going to make her grow up?

[liadnan]

My former head of chambers was called in 72, and off the top of my head I can think of three or four other women at my end of the bar who've made it to silk called around the same time (CB was 76). Anne Mallalieu must have been the same vintage too because that was when she brought that ridiculous tax case on deductability of her suits immediately post-pupillage, no? All of them very tough women of course (and all silks now): I've always presumed they must have had a hellish time, but in retrospect that seems the moment of the great break through. As for Butler-Sloss (1955)...

(PS more women than men in my year at bar school and every year since, though I don't now how well that translated to pupillage and tenancy. Said exHoC's husband, a criminal silk, tells me most entrants to the criminal bar are now women, about which he has concerns with which I shall not burden you for fear of giving you an apopleptic fit..)

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Yes, the odd adultness has often struck me - when Rowan says, giving Nicola Very Important Cricket Coaching Advice about fielding, that 'people your size can't hit double centuries', I've found myself thinking 'Size? Oh, right, hang on, the skinny wee twins are not actually that much older than Autumn Term.'

On Jan and the law - it's interesting, isn't it, that both Jan and Rowan, two of AF's most obviously adult characters, get handed careers by their families which they would never have considered for themselves? Jan's been taking science subjects, presumably with a plan to study some form of science at university, before her 'hairy monster' dropout brother leaves the hole in the uncle's firm, and suggests law to her. Ditto Rowan with Trennels, when she seems to have planned to be a games mistress. Whereas the (again, admittedly younger) characters who plan their own futures have no notions beyond riding in the Grand National and sailing round the world solo.

(Don't know whether Karen and her ready-made family should be included in the list of ready-made careers. I don't think I've ever quite bought into the notion of her extreme scholarliness vanishing so early in her Oxford career because of the dubious charms of Edwin...)

[owl]

Such a lot happens in the twins' LIV year that it's hard to remember sometimes that they're still only 13.

I was never quite convinced by Karen's switch from academic girl to domestic goddess either. Even if the archeological career was out, I'd have expected her to retain her interest in books and so on. She is only 19/20, after all!

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

Rowan planned to be an architect, not a games mistress. And she, with Nicola, was the one who really missed Hampstead.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

What I find interesting about Jan being the anti-Lois - and I agree, that's very much how she's presented in Cricket Term - is that Nicola is far closer to Lois's mentality in terms of minding desperately. I suppose we could see this as evidence of her youth, but to be honest, I can't ever see her achieving anything like Jan's (or even Rowan's) detachment, and imagine her as a Wren who still minds terribly about successes and people, even if she never lets it show.

[forester48.livejournal.com]

I've always found Miranda's interest in Jan to be another subtle subtext in the wide variety of relationships in AF's books. It is the only tiny whisper of a possible sapphic love interest never to be in any way recognised and certainly not requited. Jan is far too introspective and disinterested to be anything but rather bored when Miranda approaches her at the end of Cricket Term to ask for her address. But it is interesting to speculate as to whether Miranda in her ultra mature (among a cast of, as has been mentioned before, very mature early teenagers) way recognises more than she actually realises in Jan's complex character.
Jan is a type found in many school stories - beautiful, capable and above noticing the devotion she inspires in the Juniors. But in AF's hands she becomes a far more real and developed character even though she only plays a relatively minor part.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't really buy it as hints of the sapphic (although my slash goggles find it a most likeable notion, especially as Rowan and Jan have clearly had a rather wordless affair, according to the inside of my head), or indeed it being the only instance of a crush - what about Lawrie being 'keen' on Margaret Jessop, or even on Lois? The difference being that Lawrie is a bit of an idiot, so it can be recuperated under immaturity and an inability to play netball when MJ is anywhere in the vicinity or not try terribly, disastrously hard to make Lois's hike a success, whereas Miranda is clever, and hard-headed enough to replace her Best Friends at regular intervals, and very much not the schoolgirl-crush type.

I agree that it's an interesting situation, a relatively realistic take on the common Crush on a Wonderful Senior found in endless school stories. I suppose what interests me about it is how AF presents it - given how unsentimental Nicola is, she doesn't appear to find Miranda's obsession with Jan at all sick-making, whimsical or odd, and Miranda doesn't appear to think it's something about which she shouldn't talk freely to N. Even Jan isn't embarrassed or taken aback by one of her table approaching her for her address, just resigned - are we to assume she's been aware of Miranda's admiration all along, all those time's she's been serving fish pie and indicating her need for morning silences?

[liadnan]

Doesn't Miranda refer to other juniors having crushes which hers was "not like" in that same conversation?

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

The kirbigrips-under-pillows people who Keith was scathing about?

[anstruther.livejournal.com]

I find AF's presentation of Miranda's interest in Jan quite odd. Miranda seems to have more than an aesthetic appreciation of Jan, given that she colours when speaking of her, and recognises her from long distances, but the fact that she talks about the whole thing so freely has always slightly bothered me: surely she'd only do this if the crush was an affectation, not genuine? But then the whole Lower Fifth(?) red-roses-and-kirbigrips crush on Ellen and Joyce seems so unbelievably over the top to me - I'm obviously just repressed.

I hadn't actually seen Jan's resigned reaction to Miranda as a tacit acknowledgement of a junior crush before, I'd read it as indicating general resignation towards the school-leaving ritual of people rushing round getting everyone's addresses so they can stay in touch forever. But yes, it would probably have been very unusual for someone in such a junior form to ask. Am in two minds whether Jan had bothered to notice Miranda's admiration previously, guess it comes back to your original question whether Jan really would have been so unaware of how others perceived her.

[forester48.livejournal.com]

Sorry to break in on the inside of your head but Rowan and Jan don't have much to do with each other, do they, apart from school teams? I can't recall a single conversation between them.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Little purchase in canon is required for events inside my head, but Rowan has evidently wondered enough about Jan in Cricket Term to know something of her family circumstances, which, given how little Jan ever says, suggests that perhaps their being on the same teams has resulted in some meeting of minds...

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