Twentieth Century Scottish Womens Fiction
4 total works
In A Sparrow's Flight, her second novel, first published in 1989, Margaret Elphinstone is already occupying her characteristic location on the borderlands which were to become familiar territory in her subsequent writing. The novel is set in the 'debatable lands' between Scotland and England but explores more elusive borders between waking and dreaming, sanity and madness, myth and reality, and the unsettling landscape between our imagined pasts and hoped for futures. Thomas and Naomi are on a journey through a world that has experienced catastrophic change. Early reviewers, writing amid the Cold War, placed the story in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust. The author offers no such certainty. The plaintive but unexplained references to 'before the world changed' resonate with a menace all the more unnerving in its ambiguity. Through this regenerating landscape - the previously blighted 'empty lands' - Thomas and Naomi find their journey turns full circle, returning them to their starting point as changed people, with new understandings of friendship and belonging. As with every quest there is a grail and their grail is music.Its rediscovery is a metaphor for that Golden Age we all need to believe existed 'before the world changed'.
"...powerfully convincing in its blend of medievalism and post-modern disillusion..." Douglas Gifford
"...powerfully convincing in its blend of medievalism and post-modern disillusion..." Douglas Gifford
This new edition of An Apple from a Tree, with additional stories previously published elsewhere, provides the reader with the opportunity to revisit some of Margaret Elphinstone's early writing. Themes and motifs which have come to characterise much of her subsequent work are already evident. Her writing resonates with a deep and underlying concern with the way we understand and relate to our environment while at the same time it is always ready to challenge conventional perceptions of myth and reality. By restructuring paradigms and demonstrating the impermanence of accepted boundaries she offers insights which can be both surprising and disturbing. Her characters are frequently from elsewhere - whether the realms of folklore or far places and different cultures - and display the stranger's ability to make unexpected assumptions or ask uncomfortable questions. "...spicy, ironic, passionate, humorous, painful and witty.." Jennie Renton, Scottish Book Collector
Islanders is Margaret Elphinstone's first novel, written when she lived at Northbanks, Papa Stour in 1979. It is the author's expression of the seven years she lived in Shetland, during which she explored Shetland by land and sea, discovered the sagas while working in Shetland Library, learned to watch birds on Fair Isle, Noss and other islands, and spent several summers as a volunteer on a dig at Da Biggings, Papa Stour, excavating a Norse farm. The novel was re-written in the early 1990s, partly in the National Library of Scotland, partly in Shetland, and partly (thanks to a Scottish Arts Council travel grant) in Iceland. Islanders was first published in 1994. It is now (2008) nearly thirty years since the first draft was written; since then Margaret Elphinstone has lived in other places and written other books. But it was Shetland, and Islanders, that first inspired and formed her as a writer.
Naomi, the enigmatic fiddler, arrives in Clachanpluck, bringing her music and the ominous potential of an incomer. Her unexpected arrival enriches this remote forest village even as she disrupts it. This is a story of an all-consuming love of the land; the power of friendship; the seasonal round of creation and death; and the physical thrill of storm and rhythm, fire and candlelight. The impending sense of catastrophe - global and personal - which haunts this world, finally erupts in violence: trust and love are the casualties. The Incomer follows in the tradition of the ballads: fantasy gilds the mundane and the ordinary is made extraordinary. Published here with an Introduction by Dorothy McMillan.