I read O Caledonia after being given it for my 16th birthday. The central location of the novel is a remote castle in the North-East of Scotland, and the protagonist is Janet, a 16 year-old girl navigating life in that dramatic setting. I live in rural Scotland, in a landscape not dissimilar to that which Elspeth Barker conveys, and so I found that the world of Janet was one I could easily imagine and place myself in as I sat reading with a view of the hills or after a long exam. I became obsessed with both the poetic, entertaining style of writing and the vast topics which the novel covers through eccentric, absurdist characters and conversations, and I would absolutely recommend the novel. I've written up my thoughts on the book below, and from this point onwards there are major spoilers.
One of the reasons I love this book is that Janet isn't some fully-formed feminist dropped into the 1950s - she is flawed, she doesn't care for her own sex, she is angry at how she and others she cares for are mistreated but she is ultimately a normal, self-centred young person navigating life with morals in flux. In many instances, Janet is disdainful of her sex, of the members-only club of womanhood, of the "powerful freemasonship of the female" which Vera describes. Some of the most relatable moments of the novel for me are when Janet catches herself enjoying the feminine luxuries of clothes or carpets before scolding herself, reasserting allegiance to a resolute identity that keeps shifting.
I think that most adolescent girls can find themselves caught in this higher promise, turning away from baby pink, from dresses, perfume and luscious soft furnishings, for the sake of keeping their forming identity untainted by society-assigned likes or dislikes. In Janet's case, her childhood and the set-up from the first half of the novel keep her choices entirely binary: there is giggling girlhood, with the full influence of the outside world, with skirts and blouses and scents and manners, a closely guarded group that might acknowledge some of the problems of the world but might also turn against those women outwith its boundaries (as Vera turns on the outcast from proprietary Lila). Then, there is the uncomplicated realm of Auchnasaugh, where one has the freedom to be vulgar, coarse and strange, to be intellectual and not care about one's posture when reading, but where one doesn't have the comradery to protect herself against poking boys or the womanly knowledge to avoid sour cream in your dress.
These two distinct paths and the association with place which the second holds are exemplified when Janet considers suburbia: "in such places the feminine mystique might flourish… As usual she felt guilty and treacherous for these thoughts. Her allegiance was to Auchnasaugh.". The dramatic emphasis on treachery shows a girl with an identity in flux, who is tempted by feminine normality, by growing up, but still grinds her feet into the ground of her childhood home and identity.
Janet finds that she fits into neither path - she can't be a strange, unmannered Auchnasaugh lad because her knickers show when she climbs the tree, because she is growing too old and too womanly in shape for the boys to be friendly to her, and she yearns for romance and rustling skirts - yet the world of women won't allow a strange Auchnasaugh girl to cross their threshold.
So, Janet is above the vulgar boys, and disdainful of the girls, giving rise to her celebration of the oddities of her identity - she chooses an eccentric purple dress in search of a "kindred spirit", she tells fellow schoolgirls that she calls her cats subjunctives, because if she won't be admitted to either identity then she will at least be resolutely herself. This is summed in another (very relatable, again) line: "she took a perverse kind of delight in caring for anything the others found especially wearisome".
I love how Barker uses these identities to simulate the warring mind of a teenage girl, and I found that I could see myself in so much of Janet as she seeks to balance the child and woman in her identity - the ultimate tragedy is that Janet doesn't have the time nor opportunity to discover herself beyond the two extremes laid before her.