Summary of O Caledonia
Janet is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in the remote Scottish castle of Auchnasaugh during the 1950s. The novel opens with her sudden death before recounting her life as a sensitive and intelligent girl, the eldest of five siblings, with a deep love of books and animals. Misunderstood by her mother and by almost everyone else, Janet grows up feeling isolated and out of place. Her parents run a boarding school for boys in the castle, where she attends lessons alongside them, but she is later sent to a girls’ boarding school, where she struggles to fit in and longs for home. After leaving school, she falls in love for the first time, but her life ends before it has truly begun, and even her family seems more relieved than grief-stricken.
Reasons to read O Caledonia
O Caledonia is a poetic, darkly funny Gothic novel that paints a vivid yet melancholic picture of growing up in the isolated Scottish countryside during the post-war years. Although it opens with the protagonist’s murder, it is not a whodunnit but rather the coming-of-age story of an unconventional and misunderstood girl searching for her own identity while those around her try to mould her into someone she is not. It is the only novel by Scottish author Elspeth Barker, published when she was fifty-one, and has since become regarded as a cult classic and a forgotten Gothic masterpiece.
Setting: Scotland (UK)
Novel set in Scotland: the fictional castle of Auchnasaugh is largely inspired by Drumtochty Castle in Aberdeenshire, where Elspeth Barker herself grew up.
Original title: O Caledonia
Year of publication: 1991
Nr of pages: 208
