SOME writers have an especially powerful gift for creating a fictional world, conjuring characters and places that connect with an identifiable reality, yet heightened, resonating in the imagination. Thomas Hardy's Wessex, in his own words a ''partly real, partly dream country''; Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Mearns and its people: these live in the minds of countless readers who have never seen the physical landscapes.

Less well-known than either novelist, yet sharing some qualities of each, was the writer Violet Jacob (1863-1946). Once generally remembered as a Scots poet - her Tam i' the Kirk was much anthologised - Jacob is now emerging as a superb prose writer. Her novels were compared to Hardy's in her own time; she also produced short stories, children's books, diaries, and letters.

Violet Jacob was born Violet Kennedy-Erskine, into an ancient, landed family whose colourful history she recorded in The Lairds of Dun (1931). The fifth laird, a Moderator of the Church of Scotland, was friendly with John Knox. The thirteenth was, by contrast, a Jacobite. Jacob's grandmother, Augusta, was an illegitimate daughter of actress Dorothy Jordan and the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV. This richly mixed background fed Jacob's fiction, including her great novel Flemington, first published in 1911.

Reissued by the Association of Scottish Literary Studies in 1994 as a handsome hardback, Flemington now appears from Canongate in paperback format, along with a selection of Jacob's excellent, neglected, shorter fiction. Both novel and tales are set in the territory that most inspired her: Angus, in eastern Scotland, with its haunting sea-coast, fields, and glens.

Jacob's sense of place is strong, but her witty, humane fiction transcends the label ''regional''. Despite a focus on rural and small-town life, it also firmly repudiates the kailyard, as various commentators have noted. Jacob's fiction ranges from tragic to wryly comic (or often a subtle combination), and though frequently moving, is rarely sentimental. The characters are not stereotypes, but flawed human beings trapped by circumstances of time, place and society. The past is lovingly explored, but not idealised, in Jacob's lucid prose.

Flemington is set around 1745-6, the period of the second Jacobite rebellion and the Battle of Culloden. The novel's key location

is Balnillo House, home to judge and covert Jacobite David Logie and his brother James. It is clearly modelled on Jacob's own atmospheric birthplace, the House of Dun, now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. Balnillo, the nearby ''Dutch-looking'' town of Montrose, and its environs are all vividly evoked. (Jacob, a gifted painter, is a strongly visual writer.) The novel also finely depicts sophisticated society in Edinburgh, and ends, poignantly, in Holland.

But perhaps more striking even than the locations are the characters. Chief protagonist Archie Flemington is a young artist of Jacobite parentage raised by a passionately Whig grandmother. His employment as a portrait painter is a cover for a less attractive occupation: government spy.

Archie, sent to spy on the Jacobite Logie brothers at Balnillo, unexpectedly draws close to James, the younger, who confides the tale of his tragic past. Unwilling to betray James, yet loath

to disappoint his strong-willed, charismatic grandmother, Archie confronts torn loyalties.

Jacob draws the reader into sympathy with the young Whig spy, as well as the Jacobite James Logie, a mercenary soldier and bigot but vulnerable, too. We see them in the context of conflicts raging across ''this unhappy country'' (Scotland), and war-torn Europe. Even Christian Flemington, Archie's grandmother (whose grip on the young man is brilliantly explored), though manipulative, is magnificently dignified in a harsh, male-dominated society. The reader is invited to feel compassion for characters of different political persuasions; we see their faults, yet also their suffering. This is a novel which calls for understanding, tolerance, and forgiveness, a message relevant to our times.

And although Flemington engages with serious issues - public and personal history, loyalty and betrayal, political intrigue and bigotry, the horrors and waste of war - it is gripping, with the qualities of a stirring adventure tale. There is light relief in the portrayal of the vain and foppish David Lodge; scenes showing the elderly judge admiring his legs in a mirror when he thinks no-one is looking are delicious. Perhaps most memorable of all is the grotesque figure of Skirling Wattie, a legless vagabond drawn around the Angus countryside in a cart by a pack of dogs; although corrupt, the musical beggar, named for his piping, has a sweet singing voice in which lies ''the whole distinctive spirit of the national poetry of Scotland''.

The Tales from Angus which complete this volume are drawn from two collections. Apart from Thievie and The Debatable Land, anthologised in recent years, the splendid stories from Tales of My Own Country (1922) have been long (and unfairly) out of print. Although Jacob herself calls them ''portraits of places'', they are also portraits of people on the fringes of society: gypsies, sheep-stealers, seafarers, farm workers,

and, often, hard-working rural women (there is some foreshadowing of Gibbon, here). Some are serious, even tragic tales,

others are amusing or supernatural. All exhibit Jacob's characteristic irony and brisk impatience with pomposity.

The remaining stories were discovered in manuscript by Ronald Garden while he was working on his M Litt in Aberdeen. They first appeared in a posthumous volume, The Lum Hat and Other Stories, in 1982. Several, including the lovely The Fifty-Eight Wild Swans, are in Scots, and the taut, symbolically suggestive novella, The Lum Hat, is quite exceptional. Now, of Jacob's Angus fiction, only The Interloper (1904) demands reprinting.

Violet Jacob was, by all accounts (including Hugh MacDiarmid's) a woman of great personal charm and beauty, her life long and varied like those writers Margaret Oliphant before her and Naomi Mitchison after.

But she knew sorrow, losing both her father and sister in early life; especially devastating was the death of her son, aged 20, at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Her marriage to an Irish army officer, Arthur Otway Jacob, was happy, and during an early posting to Central India with Arthur's regiment, the spirited Violet (who disliked the conventionalities of the Raj society) enjoyed independent exploration, recorded in her Diaries and Letters from India 1895-1900 (published by Canongate, 1990).

Edinburgh University, which awarded Jacob an honorary degree in 1936, owns her marvellous watercolours of Indian flora, held in Edinburgh's Royal Botanical Gardens.

But army life was peripatetic, and later, even this adventurous woman yearned for a more settled existence. Violet Jacob, whose mother was Welsh, found some peace in regular retreats to the Welsh Marches, the setting for some of her fiction, including her first novel, The Sheepstealers (1902). It was only after Arthur's death in 1936, however, that she returned to her first love, Angus. There, in Kirriemuir, she died in 1946.

Jacob might have claimed a place in the Erskine private family graveyard. She chose instead to share a modest grave with her husband, marked by a small stone in the public churchyard, beside the tiny church at Dun.

But we should not forget Violet Jacob. Happily, the new volume of her work gives us a chance to marvel at the power of her fictional world, and to share her enduring vision.

n A paperback edition

of Flemington and Tales from Angus will be published on May 21

by Canongate, priced

at #7.99.