SOURCE: Poggi, Valentina. “Vision and Space in Elspeth Davie's Fiction.” In A History of Scottish Women's Writing, edited and introduced by Douglas Gifford and edited by Dorothy McMillan, pp. 526–36. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Poggi discusses a cardinal theme of Davie's fiction, as defined by Poggi: “the primacy of space and vision in the perception of reality.”

Reading Elspeth Davie's stories and novels is like visiting a retrospective exhibition of paintings or drawings by the Bolognese artist Giorgio Morandi: in both cases the dominant impression is of sameness combined with variation, familiarity allied to strangeness; with Morandi it is simple household objects, with Davie it is commonplace settings and situations that come to be invested with symbolic and metaphysical meanings. It is not known whether Davie—a teacher and connoisseur of art, as any reader could surmise even in the absence of biographical data¹—ever...