Elspeth Barker, Author of a Single Beloved Novel, Dies at 81

Elspeth Roberta Cameron Langlands was born on Nov. 16, 1940, in Edinburgh. When she was 7 her mother and father, Robert and Elizabeth (Brash) Langlands, moved their household to Drumtochty, a neo-Gothic citadel in Kincardineshire that her father was rumored to have purchased from the king of Norway.

The Langlandses established a boys’ preparatory faculty, which Elspeth attended as the one woman. Her classmates, rugged and rural, made a sport of tormenting her. She turned to books and animals for friendship, and he or she marked milestones of adolescence by the approaching and going of pets.

“I bear in mind being 18 and the canine that had been there all my life — a golden retriever referred to as Rab — died,” she instructed The Japanese Day by day Press of Norwich in 2012. “And I keep in mind that, excess of being allowed a gin and tonic or going to college, the loss of life of that canine signaled the tip of my childhood.”

She went away to boarding faculty and later attended Somerville Faculty, Oxford, the place she studied fashionable languages. She was good however unwell match for the pains of upper schooling; after she slept by means of her remaining examination, she was ejected and not using a diploma.

She moved to London, the place she waited on tables, clerked in a bookstore and fell in with the town’s literary set. When she was 22, the Canadian poet Elizabeth Good launched her to Mr. Barker. He was 50.

Mr. Barker was married however estranged from his first spouse, Jessica Barker, a strict Roman Catholic who refused to divorce him — a proven fact that had not stored him from carrying on an extended affair with Ms. Good that produced 4 kids. Their love had cooled, and Ms. Good confirmed little compunction in letting somebody take her place.

With a mortgage from considered one of Mr. Barker’s associates, the playwright Harold Pinter, the brand new couple moved north, to a village outdoors Norwich. Their house grew to become a method station for touring college students, poets and artists, in addition to for Mr. Barker’s already sizable brood, lots of them grown with households of their very own.