Jane Roberts - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Roberts was born in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her parents, Delmer Hubbell Roberts and Marie Burdo, divorced when she was two years old. With her only child, the young Marie then returned to her own parents, and the home that the family had rented for a number of years: half of a double dwelling in a poor neighborhood in Saratoga Springs. Marie had begun experiencing the early stages of rheumatoid arthritis by 1932, but worked as much as possible. Eventually Roberts' grandfather, Joseph Burdo, with whom she shared a deep mystical identification, was unable to support two extra people, and the family had to rely upon public assistance. Roberts' grandmother was killed in an automobile accident in 1936. The next year, her grandfather moved out of the house. By then Marie was partially incapacitated, and the Welfare Department began to furnish mother and daughter with occasional (and often unreliable) domestic help. When Marie became a bedridden invalid, it was Jane’s responsibility to take care of her. This included cooking, cleaning, bringing her the bedpan, and getting up in the middle of the night to refuel the stove. Her embittered mother used to tell Jane that she was going to turn on the gas jets in the middle of the night and kill them both. "My mother was a real bitch," Jane said, "but she was an energetic bitch. When my mother attempted suicide for about the fifth time, she took a whole mess of sleeping pills and was in the hospital. I went to the welfare lady and said, 'I can’t take it anymore. I’ve just got to leave.'" Over and over Marie told Jane that she was no good, that the daughter's birth had caused the mother's illness. Well before she was 10 years old Jane had developed persistent symptoms of colitis. By her early teens she had an overactive thyroid gland. Her vision was poor; she required very strong glasses (which she seldom wore). For most of 1940 and half of 1941 Jane was in a strictly-run Catholic orphanage in Troy, NY while her mother was hospitalized in another city for treatment of her arthritis. After attending public schools, Jane attended Skidmore College from 1947 to 1950.

Jane had been going with a fellow named Walt at the time, and they decided to go to the west coast by motorcycle to see Jane’s father (who had also come from a broken home). Walt and Jane then married, living together for three years. She "then found out — was working in a radio factory putting lover-boy Walt through school what everybody else in town knew -- he isn't going through school." It was then that Jane first met the former commercial artist Robert F. Butts (born June 20, 1919). The fourth time they met, at a party and never having dated, Jane "just looked at him and said, 'Look, I’m leaving Walt, and I'm going to leave by myself or I'm going to leave with you, so just let me know." Jane and Rob married on December 27, 1954.

She wrote in a variety of genres: poetry, short stories, children’s literature, nonfiction, science fiction and fantasy and novels. When she was in her 30s, she and her husband, Robert, began to record what she said were messages from a personality named "Seth", and she wrote several books about the experience.