“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Jane regarded all of these works as being science “fantasy” rather than “straight” science fiction. Her fictional themes especially were extensions of much of her earlier poetry, and contained the same kind of thinking that had led to her breaking with her church. She had no conscious intimations that within a decade she would develop the Seth material. “My mind just worked that way,” Jane said of her stories. “I was concerned with those themes so I wrote about them.”

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.