Janet Teissier du Cros

Janet Teissier du Cros née Janet Sinclair Craigie Grierson (1905–1990) was a writer, translator, broadcaster and pianist who was brought up in Scotland and then lived in France for sixty years. She wrote about her life in wartime France in Divided Loyalties:a Scotswoman in Occupied France.

Born on 26 January 1905 in Aberdeen, her parents were Mary and Herbert Grierson, scholar and academic. Janet was the youngest of five girls who grew up in a prosperous, literary household: living in Aberdeen until 1916 and then in Edinburgh. Her father wanted his daughters to be fluent in French and employed Swiss governesses for them. Her later education was at St George's School in Edinburgh. There she met the writer Janet Adam Smith who was a friend until the day she died.

Her musical talent took her to study in Vienna. Back in Edinburgh, she met François Teissier du Cros, engineer and physicist, and married him at the end of 1930. They went to live near his family in the Cevennes, southern France, and this is where her wartime memoirs are set. In 1944 she hitch-hiked north on a US army vehicle to find her husband. Janet and François Teissier du Cros and their four children lived in Paris for many years after the war, but moved back to the Teissier du Cros home at Mandiargues near Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort in 1972. She died there on 14 October 1990 and is buried in a family cemetery.

Two of her sisters were writers: Molly Dickins, author of A Wealth of Relations, and Flora Grierson who also co-founded the Samson Press.

The French economist André Teissier du Cros () is one of her children.

Teissier du Cros’ book Divided Loyalties (1962) tells the story of her experiences as a British woman in occupied France, in the Cevennes where the Resistance was active. Her husband was away much of the time, initially with the army, and she was often uncertain about where he was and what he was doing. She lived in a small rural cottage with her young children, and struggled to get enough food for the family, while estranged from her in-laws because of disagreements about their support for Marshal Pétain. Reviewers praised the book for the quality of the writing as well as the compelling personal story of a strong woman dealing with an extraordinary situation. A few years later she was invited to write features about France for the Glasgow Herald.

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