“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The photograph of Jane is 33 years old. It was taken by an older lady friend who was treating her to an outing at a spa just outside of the New York State resort of Saratoga Springs, where Jane lived with her bedridden mother, Marie, and a housekeeper. In a childish hand Jane had scrawled her friend’s name on the back of the picture, along with the date. Many years later she was to tell me, “My mother hated that woman.” In the snapshot it’s a sunlit day in August, 1941. Jane is 12 years old. She sits on the grass before some evergreen shrubs; she leans slightly back on her right hand, her bare legs rather primly folded. She wears a print dress that had been given to her in the Roman Catholic orphanage in Troy, some 35 miles from Saratoga Springs; she’d spent the previous 18 months there in the institution while her mother had been hospitalized in another city for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Jane also wears a short-sleeved pullover sweater. Her mother had knitted it during her stay in the hospital.

6. It took more than a little while for Jane’s mystical nature to show itself in prose. Two years after we married, she published her first work of fiction, a short story about reincarnation called “The Red Wagon”: It appeared in the December, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [© 1956 by Fantasy House, Inc., New York, N.Y.]. She was 27 years old, and most pleased with the beginning of her professional career. Within the next several years she sold a number of additional stories to the same magazine, as well as two short novels, and also published poetry and a little fiction in other markets.

I remember being a little surprised at her subject matter for “The Red Wagon” — for it’s not contradictory to write here that even though she was so interested in reincarnation as a theory, we seldom talked about it. “The Red Wagon” is included in the collection Ladies of Fantasy/Two Centuries of Sinister Stories by The Gentle Sex, © 1975 by Manley and Lewis, and published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., New York, N.Y., 10016.