Notes from the Henhouse: Collected Essays

(Hardback)

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As a teenager, Elspeth Barker had two great desires: to have a passionate love affair with a poet and to be a writer. She achieved the first when she and the poet George Barker fell in love: although he was perpetually broke, had several children by previous lovers and couldn't marry her as his first wife refused a divorce, they were extremely happy together, had five children and finally married two years before George's death. They had five children and finally married two years before George's death.

The only trouble was that looking after the somewhat impractical George, their children, some of George's other children (and occasionally his ex-lover) and the family's menagerie of pets, meant that Elspeth had no time for writing. Fortunately, after her children left home George and her eldest daughter Raffaella encouraged her to get started. Since the 1990s she wrote for papers including The Independent, The Guardian and The Sunday Times. Notes from the Henhouse is a collection of the resulting journalism.

Funny, moving and totally delightful, it is a book about a life, about pet labradors and pesky Agas, about drunken Saturday nights and blissful mornings in the garden, about books and babies, about widowhood and aging.

Author Bio

Elspeth Barker (1940-2022) wrote and published her first and only novel O Caledonia, at the age of 51. It was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.In her career as a journalist, Elspeth wrote for the Independent, Observer, Sunday Times, London Review of Books and others. For ten years in the 1980s Elspeth taught Latin at what she describes as a naughty girls' school on the Norfolk coast. Later, she worked as a lecturer in Creative Writing at the Norwich University of the Arts. She was married to the poet George Barker, with whom she had 5 children, they lived in rural Norfolk. After his death in 1991 she lived on there with numerous badly behaved animals and a home that welcomed everyone.

Raffaella Barker has been writing novels since the age of 26, and has been a promiscuous reader all her life. She has written 9 novels and worked as a journalist for Country Life, The Sunday Times, Conde Nast Traveller and Harpers Bazaar. Raffaella lectured on the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia, and continues to teach creative writing privately. The eldest of Elspeth and George Barker's 5 children, she has inherited their penchant for badly behaved animals and, about her home on the North Norfolk Coast, has said, 'The Norfolk landscape sends a shiver through my soul.'