One of Scottish literature’s most enigmatic figures, Elspeth Barker has won a large and loyal fanbase ever since the publication of her one and only novel, O Caledonia, in 1991. Now, we can finally snatch a glimpse inside the mind of the artist in this revealing and timely collection of essays charting her development through childhood and beyond. David Robinson grapples with the legacy of Barker and her unique talent in this last review of 2023.

Notes from the Henhouse
By Elspeth Barker
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson

As far as I can tell, there’s no filmed interview with Elspeth Barker on the internet – which, given that she only died last year, taught creative writing, wrote widely in newspapers and magazines, appeared at book festivals and, above all, that her only novel O Caledonia, published in 1991, seems to be adored by everyone who has ever read it, comes as a bit of a disappointment.   

In fact, at least according to a ten-second search on Google and YouTube, there’s not any film of her at all. Yes, every broadsheet newspaper carried a photo for her 2022 obit (high-cheekbones, wild black hair: agelessly beautiful), there are plenty of pictures of the north Norfolk house she lived in, the internet is full of the doings of her novelist daughter Raffaella, and there’s a full 45-minute documentary about her husband, the once-famous poet George Barker. About Elspeth herself, though, there’s not even a few frames of flickering black and white.  

Anyway, the point about this column isn’t the internet’s lacunae before the arrival of broadband in the early 2000s but what made me want to see what film it had had on Elspeth Barker in the first place.  Did she talk as she wrote: was she as funny, passionate, gossipy, perceptive, imaginative, intelligent in person too? Anyone who reads Barker’s just-published Notes From the Henhouse straight after O Caledonia will, I predict, also find themselves looking her up on the internet – and for exactly the same reason.  

Just who, they’ll want to know, was this woman who writes like no-one they’ve ever read before? Who writes differently because she so obviously thinks differently and thinks differently because she lives differently? Did she, like Janet, the teen protagonist of O Caledonia, really grow up in a draughty Highland castle, and keep a tame jackdaw that would follow her everywhere (‘I would see him, a dark speck among the tumbling clouds, and call his name, three times always, and see him swoop from the heavens in an unfaltering ellipse to my shoulder’) and that committed suicide by flying into the castle wall when she left? Absolutely. And when her family went on childhood holidays to the ‘house by the sea’, did the retinue on the train journey really include such a vast menagerie (‘nannies, the chief cat, budgerigars, tortoises, a goldfinch, a parrot’) as well? Did they bring along their horses too, just like Janet’s family in O Caledonia? Certainly they did. Because here they all are again, in Notes from the Henhouse (‘I have horrible memories of the horses escaping from the train and galloping down the railway line’). This, we now learn, happened in Elie. As her daughter, the novelist Raffaella Barker, points out in a beautifully loving introduction to her mother’s essays, ‘Her fiction was never far from her reality.’  

Personally, I don’t know many people whose childhood reality was to grow up in a castle, and the couple I know who did didn’t have a wildly eccentric family or tame jackdaws. But Barker’s love of Latin and Greek (subjects she taught for a decade at a girls’ school in Norfolk) is a further differentiation overhanging both books: in Notes from the Henhouse, for example, she compares her avian pet hopping up the castle stairs to Lesbia’s sparrow hopping into the underworld in Catullus’s poem. And because the non-fiction echoes the fiction so closely, you can’t help wondering whether, like Janet in O Caledonia, she really did try to kill her younger sister. Here’s what she writes in Notes from the Henhouse:  

‘Contemplating a suckling pig in a wondrous shop in Soho called, I think, King Bomba, I considered the possibility of my youngest sister served thus, with an apple in her mouth. I studied Euripides’s Medea with an enthusiasm which contained nostalgia: how fine a dinner I might have offered to my parents. That would have shown them.’ 

Before you start wondering what Freud would have made of all this, look again at Barker’s linguistic virtuosity, its curious mix of the ornately circuitous (‘wondrous shop’ etc) and the absolutely direct (‘That would have shown them’). The reader is further hooked by a double intimacy – first, because we are being told what is normally a secret (I was deadly jealous of my sister) and secondly because we know we’re not being talked down to (we’ve seen Medea, know the basics about Freud). Stir all of that together into dark comedy, cook in either a three-hour novella (O Caledonia) or posthumous collection of journalism and unpublished essays (Notes from the Henhouse) and serve. Works every time. 

Because O Caledonia is such a magical novel of adolescence (Scotland’s finest? Discuss) it is only natural to want to know what happened next to its author. The answer is the much-older poet George Barker, the man about whom his ex-lover Elizabeth Smart wrote By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. He had four children with Smart and five with Baker, and half a dozen with others.  ‘No compromise’ is written on his grave, and I can’t say he sounds easy to live with, but Elspeth clearly loved him and she writes eloquently about her sense of loss after his death in 1991. ‘I find death absolutely unacceptable and I cannot come to terms with it,’ she writes. ‘I cannot believe that all that passion, wit, eloquence and rage can be deleted by something so vulgar as the heart stopping.’  

Both with and without George, Elspeth’s life in Norfolk had its share of eccentricity. ‘We plan to buy a pair of Muscovies [ducks] to warm our laps for Sunday evening television’ she writes in one column. A Shetland pony is trained to make itself at home in the house, as is Portia, a pig who ‘only takes salad if drenched in olive oil’, loves Bulgarian wine (‘but not beer: a draught popular with many pigs of lesser sensibility’) and whose ‘favourite upright position was leaning against my legs under the kitchen table’. 

The one-word shorthand for a life such as hers is ‘bohemian’, yet it seems woefully adequate. ‘Singular’ is slightly better, not least because her fame rests on a single novel. ‘Obstinately individual’ is two words yet seems more accurate. Maybe I’m wrong: as I said at the start, I’ve never met her or seen her, but going by the books alone, it’s how I’d sum her up. Her daughter puts it much better: ‘Because she wrote what she lived and lived what she wrote, she comes alive in her writing.’ If you haven’t read her yet, do. 

Notes from the Henhouse by Elspeth Barker is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, priced £18.99