INTERVIEW
half hours clear’ each way, opened up the time to finally tackle a story that had been on her mind for years. Actually getting the tale of four genera-
‘Women have a unique way of bonding, they make connections through family, kids and books’
tions of women connected by an Edwardian villa in Arran down on paper had to wait until life calmed down. It pulls together fragments and themes from Wark’s own family and life story with history, geography, horticulture and tapestry in a complex pattern that was not compatible with long-distance commuting, the school run and an ailing mother. ‘When [my children] Caitlin and James went
to university and my mum died, it was the right time,’ she says. ‘I had the knowledge, I wanted to do it really badly. I couldn’t have written this book when I was 25, I didn’t have the life expe- rience. It’s about loss, about having kids and not having kids. It’s about the pull of place. Could I emigrate? Could I leave Scotland? I don’t think I could.’
The value of friendship The Elizabeth Pringle of the title was inspired by – not based on, Wark is adamant that none of her characters are real people – her Aunt Roberta. ‘She was one of six, the only daugh- ter in a big tomato-growing family in the Clyde Valley. She was slightly eccentric, a wonderful woman. Apart from being a VAD in the First World War, she looked after the house.’ The family was aware that there had been
Right: Wark’s debut novel was written here, in her Glasgow flat.
someone in Aunt Roberta’s past. ‘When she was very young, we all knew she had been engaged to a farmer’s son in Lanarkshire. And he had gone, and she hadn’t. She never left. ‘And that always struck me, the idea of the
pull, leaving and not leaving, and what makes you leave. It’s so difficult to imagine now. We know that people went for economic neces- sity but once they left, that was it. There was no Skype, no email, there was no coming back. There was the odd letter and that was it.’ Wark uses these ideas – and other materials
from the family archive, including letters written by her great uncle during the First World War – to construct a story that slowly unpicks Eliz- abeth Pringle’s life after her death. She leaves her lovely house in Lamlash to a free-spirited Glaswegian woman who came on holiday to Arran as a young mother and pushed her pram past the garden. It’s that daughter, now a burnt-
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out journalist, who takes on the property and solves the mystery at the heart of the narrative. There are men in The Legacy of Elizabeth
Pringle, but in supporting roles. Having waited until she is 58 to write a novel, it was going to be on Wark’s terms. ‘People have assumed it would be political,’ she says with her scath- ing Newsnight face on. ‘Why would it be political? And I’m not interested in writing about a newsroom or a television studio. I
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