Fandom Snowflake Challenge #6: "Share a Favourite Piece of Canon"

[greerwatson]

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

Boy, this one was hard! I think it's the "favourite" plus "love it so much" that made it so tricky. I have so many things I like, albeit to varying degrees, that it was really hard to pick. Then I decided to treat this challenge as more a matter of reccing something obscure that others might not know.

Jean in the Morning is the first volume of a four-part series. The author (whose real name was apparently Elizabeth Jane Cameron) was, in the day, better known under the name "Jane Duncan". She wrote a long semi-autobiographical series of books that is usually called the "My Friend" series because their titles take the form My Friend [NAME]. In later volumes, the protagonist, Janet Sandison, now widowed, finds a publisher for some books she's been writing about a working-class girl named Jean Robertson.

Then "Jane Duncan" wrote those books for real.

Jean in the Morning was published in 1969 under the "Janet Sandison" pseudonym. Three more books followed, not all focused on Jean herself; the series has a rather wobbly overall story arc. Of the four volumes, the first is by far the best.

Written in the first person, it covers "wee Jeanie"'s story from her first day at school in 1911 till she leaves and goes to work as a housemaid, i.e. seven years or so. She's born in a slum tenement for the families of railway workers, gradually works out the social hierarchy of the commuter suburb of Glasgow in which she lives, and sees the home front of World War I from the very bottom rung of society.

She's a street-smart, canny kid. She sees a lot.