Margaret Elphinstone

Light - Margaret Elphinstone's latest novel

Light is set in May, 1831, on a small island off the Isle of Man. The sole inhabitants - sisters in law, Lucy and Diya and their three children - watch over the ancient lighthouse. Their traditional way of life is suddenly threatened when Robert Stevenson's surveyors arrive to prepare for the construction of a modern lighthouse. Events move quickly and unpredictably and the islanders display varied and ambiguous attitudes to the prospect of change.

"Another bold step forward for a ‘traditional’ writer who seldom fails to make the long-ago and faraway seem as near as the matter of our own everyday lives.” Kirkus Reviews

Read more reviews of Light and and read an extract from Light

Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature

Margaret Elphinstone features in the recently published 'Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature'

Ian Campbell, in his chapter: ‘Disorientation of Place, Time and ‘Scottishness’: Conan Doyle, Linklater, Gunn, Mackay Brown and Elphinstone’ says:

"Margaret Elphinstone continues to produce and shape multiple careers both as university teacher and a creative writer attracting more and more interest. Her work – assured, attractive, innovative – has the attraction of rarely offering the same pleasures twice, though certain themes recur. These include interest in the historic and mythical past, the Norse and Scandinavian invasions and influences on Scotland, a perceptible interest in the fantastic, a strong feeling for nature......

"Elphinstone’s characters often travel over huge distances: her world is one of expanding vision, an attempt to connect to a half-understood natural world, to understand the perplexities of human characters in affection as well as danger and stress. She has mastered the short story (An Apple From a Tree, 1991) and full-scale fantasy (Hy Brasil 2002). Voyageurs (2003) is a confident and convincing excursion into those who explored and settled eastern Canada, the settlers who fought climate, indigenous people and misunderstanding at home to carve out lives in a really new world.

"Alone among the writers covered here, she offers the further challenge of an unguessable future: no two of her books have been quite alike, and the next may be something completely new always, though, searching the changing nature of reality through time and space."

From: Ian Brown, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature Volume 3: Modern Transformations: New Identities (from 1918) Edinburgh University Press 2006. p110.

Other novels in print

The narrator of Voyageurs is a young Quaker from Cumbria who travels to North America in search of his missing sister. He becomes embroiled in the War of 1812, the conflicts of the fur trade and the tensions between the native peoples and Europeans. His search takes him across Canada and into the disputed lands of the Michigan Territory. Boyd Tonkin in The Independent said: "Elphinstone brings the landscapes and peoples of 1800s Canada back to thrilling life in her pacy, colourful and intelligent epic: the finest trip along these rivers since Brian Moore's Black Robe".

In Hy Brasil the interface is between myth and reality, between the imagined worlds of our literary heritage and the world we think we live in. Hy Brasil is an island many people believed existed; it was still on Admiralty charts in the 19th century. The novel is the story which might have been.

In The Sea Road, an expansionist Viking world encounters strange societies in Greenland and Vinland; paganism struggles to co-exist with newly arrived Christianity, and a heroine from the sagas tells her 1000-year-old story of a world in flux. The Sea Road appears in '100 Best Scottish Books of All Time' produced by List Magazine. Jonathan Falla has this to say about the book:
"The Sea Road is a short, terse novel. An excellent example of ‘less is more’. The prose is often luminous, and the whole a most satisfying read."

Gato is a medieval story in which a child attempts to unravel the mysterious behaviour of the adult world. It was published as part of the innovative Sandstone Press series for new and emergent adult readers.

RECENT WRITING
In Waylaid by Islands, published in the November 2007 edition of The Bottle Imp, Margaret Elphinstone recounts her enthusiasm for the islands, real and imagined, which feature prominently in several of her novels.

Her short story The King's Daughter of Norroway appears in the collection Sea Stories published in 2007 by the National Maritime Museum to mark its 70th anniversary.

Margaret Elphinstone has provided the introduction to Katharine Stewart's Women of the Highlands

Contact information

Margaret Elphinstone is Professor of Writing in the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University, Glasgow. She regularly takes part in readings, writing workshops and other literary events and can be contacted at margaret.elphinstone@dircon.co.uk.