SOURCE: Thwaite, Anthony. “From North of the Border.” Observer, no. 10105 (9 June 1985): 24.

In the following review of A Traveller's Room, Thwaite considers Davie's fiction as very Scottish and observes that her stories find the extraordinary in ordinary lives.

Many of Elspeth Davie's settings, in A Traveller's Room, are Scottish, and she shares with Dunn a liking for isolating the extraordinary within the ordinary. But stylistically she tends to be more elaborately formal, indeed ‘poetic.’

This works best in such pieces as the title-story, in which a young girl on holiday with her family in a Perth boarding-house has romantic delusions that the room she is given belongs to an absent voyager of a dashing kind, rather than (as he eventually turns out to be) a timid brush-salesman. And she has a nice line in fantastic and often funny verbal confusion, as in ‘Bulbs’ (another boarding-house setting), in which everything...