Elspeth Barker obituary | Books

Elspeth Barker’s to start with and only novel, O Caledonia, was once described by the novelist Ali Smith as “the best least-recognized novel of the 20th century”. But in 2021, 30 decades after its very first publication – and a 12 months right before the author’s death at the age of 81 – it was reissued by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and uncovered its place as a fashionable classic of Scottish literature. The guide has reached international good results and will be revealed this September by Scribner in the US and is established to seem in France, Spain (and also in Catalonia), Estonia and Italy.

The novel tells the glittering, darkly funny tale of the shorter lifetime of a young lady, Janet, who lives in a bleak Scottish castle, phone calls her cats subjunctives, keeps a jackdaw as a pet and learns poetry by heart. The only vivid spot in her lifetime is her risque Cousin Lila, whose place rattles with vacant whisky bottles and smells of Schiaparelli’s Surprising and Craven A cigarettes.

Even though the novel’s literary forebears are Emily Brontë and Walter Scott, it is more akin to Dodie Smith’s I Seize the Castle, and the Massive Household novels of Molly Keane. Intelligent, uncomfortable Janet is in lots of ways a manifestation of Elspeth as a baby, and Cousin Lila probably a manifestation of her grownup self. But O Caledonia is considerably extra than simply just a pleasant coming-of-age novel, for it is authentic, poetic and passionate, a hymn to the worth of nature, books and the imagination.

I was a publisher at Virago Press in the late 1980s and 1 of my authors, Raffaella Barker, Elspeth’s daughter, proposed to me that her mom should produce a novel. On the energy of a couple internet pages of vivid, lyrical and amusing prose I commissioned her and took the guide with me to Hamish Hamilton, in which it was printed in 1991.

It received 4 literary awards which include the Winifred Holtby prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread initial novel prize. Elspeth was 51 when her novel appeared, and she and I went on the road jointly, travelling from just one prize ceremony and literary festival to a further. She was an appalling backseat driver, sitting driving me, whimpering and exclaiming as I drove her close to Britain.

At the Hay festival we stayed in a specially dismal B&B garlanded with notices forbidding us to clean our knickers. We drank purple wine out of teacups and smoked so many cigarettes we set off the smoke alarm, at which Elspeth flung herself below her mattress leaving me to deal with our landlady.

Wild, attractive, erudite and incredibly funny, Elspeth shone at each occasion. At a huge meal I hosted that calendar year in a Polish cafe in Hampstead, Joseph Brodsky and Clive James, very long mutual admirers, experienced at last met. All evening they sat alongside one another quoting poetry to each and every other. Further more down the desk was Elspeth. Tiring of this male show of intellect and memory, she banged the table and to their astonishment began quoting poetry in Latin and historical Greek. When she and I still left, she flagged down a police car and persuaded the occupants to push us household.

Born Elspeth Langlands in Edinburgh, Elspeth was brought up in the neo-gothic Drumtochty castle, Aberdeenshire, rumoured to have been purchased from the King of Norway. The castle was the web site of a prep school operate by her mom and dad, Elizabeth and Robert Langlands.

Like her heroine, a bookish little one with an early passion for the classics, Elspeth describes in her novel the hell of getting surrounded by boys who pulled her plaits on the rugby pitch, hurled cricket balls at her head and punched her tender adolescent chest.

She escaped to a boarding university, St Leonard’s, in St Andrews, Fife, and went on to review modern languages at Somerville Faculty, Oxford. Elspeth fell asleep in her remaining exam. Later she was out at a friend’s marriage ceremony, minor realising her father had persuaded the principal to allow for her to re-sit. Her failure to show up at the extra exam resulted in her possessions staying bagged up and her place cleared. She was sent down that working day with no degree, ending up in a bedsit in London the place she boiled eggs by holding a very hot iron upside down with a saucepan on leading.

When Elspeth was 22, Elizabeth Intelligent, the writer of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, launched her to her previous lover the poet George Barker. Elspeth grew to become what she described as a “co-wife” with Elizabeth. Both equally gals had fallen in appreciate with Barker’s poetry ahead of conference him, and both of those it turned out were to publish just one particular novel in their lifetimes, novels that have endured for many years.

Elspeth and George set up house in a 17th-century farmhouse in Itteringham, Norfolk in the 60s. Bintry Dwelling was owned by the Countrywide Have confidence in and experienced a peppercorn hire. They had 5 kids, the closing 5 of George’s 15. (They ended up to marry a lot later on, in 1989, not able to do so until finally after the death of George’s initial spouse, Jessica, a Roman Catholic, who experienced refused to divorce him.) Theirs was a existence of aged bohemia, considerable chaos and continual visitors on the notorious and at times violent Saturday ingesting evenings.

“People preferred to sit subsequent to him,” Elspeth mentioned. “Then they knew they would not have everything thrown at them.”

George was occupied with functioning as a poet, even though Elspeth taught classics at Runton Hill university for girls, wherever she wrote and developed performs in Latin with her pupils. It was not until she was nearly 50 that her ebook was commissioned.

On publication the journalist Lynn Barber organized to go to Bintry House to job interview her. Lynn was acknowledged for the demolition of lots of of her subjects and most authors had been much too frightened even to meet up with her. “Whatever you do,” I instructed Elspeth, “don’t consume till she’s left.” No matter, they drank a couple of bottles of pink wine and fell into each other’s arms, after which Lynn wrote a vivid and loving portrait of Elspeth.

Shortly right after the publication of O Caledonia George Barker died. Unaware of his modern death, John Carey wrote something slighting about his poetry in the Sunday Occasions. At the Sunday Moments Xmas get together in the Reform Club, Elspeth stormed up to him and spat out a curse in rhyming couplets ending with the text: “Be Cautious, Carey.”

Just after George’s loss of life, Elspeth turned a typical contributor to the Unbiased on Sunday, composing witty, clever parts about these kinds of subjects as her beloved pot-bellied pig Portia who took up residence under her kitchen table. She contributed to the London Evaluation of Textbooks, the Occasions Literary Complement, the Guardian and the Observer. Harpers & Queen despatched her and the writer Caroline Blackwood on a trip the place they drank and wept their way all around the battlefields of the Somme.

She taught imaginative writing at Norwich University of the Arts with the poet George Szirtes and was a tutor at the Arvon Basis with her friend Barbara Trapido. It was there they achieved the youthful Maggie O’Farrell and noticed her talent O’Farrell wrote an introduction to the 2021 reissue of O Caledonia.

In 1997 Elspeth published Loss: An Anthology, with extracts ranging from Ecclesiastes, Ovid and Horace, by Ben Jonson, John Donne, Rilke, Yeats and Housman, to Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy, and eventually a small piece by her daughter Raffaella, about her father’s funeral. In 2012 her selected journalism, Puppy Times, appeared.

Elspeth was married for a next time, to Bill Troop, in 2007 they divorced six several years later on. She remained at Bintry. Her daughters lived nearby and there ended up normally 1 or two of her sons and a good deal of animals in residence. She used her ultimate months in a regional treatment house, exactly where she held court docket with attribute attraction and type.

She is survived by her 5 little ones, Raffaella, Progles, Bruddy, Sam and Lily, and five grandchildren, Roman, Lorne, Esme, Ollie and Felix.