Elspeth Barker could write about anything and have you longing for more, which makes it sad that she wrote so little: we need to cherish every word that has survived of her. She was the wife of the poet George Barker and, in the ways that count, a poet herself – although in prose. When she died, in 2022, she had published one wonderful novel, O Caledonia, about a wayward 16-year-old girl growing up in a Scottish castle. Described by Ali Smith as “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century”, it became, once republished, a classic more than a collector’s item. She also produced clever, witty, unpredictable journalism and we now have this selection of essays, chosen by her daughter, Rafaella Barker. Notes from the Henhouse is a book for which one feels incredulous gratitude. How come, you think, she is not better known? The book deserves to be permanently on the bedside table – to cheer, reassure and inspire.
Rafaella Barker describes her mother, in the introduction, as a “classicist, mother, wife, pig fancier, dog lover, countrywoman, terrible driver and bona fide spellmaker”. She begins with a marvellous essay on birds that introduces the baby jackdaw she rescued as a child and fed from a silver mustard spoon. Such fledglings seldom survive. Hers did. He developed an appetite, landing on their dining table and “helping himself with undiscriminating relish from grey mounds of well-cooked cabbage and tremulous orange jelly”.
