Her working life began early and has never really paused. A first novel accepted by Macmillan when she was twenty-seven opened a run of books, three with Macmillan and three more with Harvester Press before she left Britain, that has continued through England, Scotland, France and the Florida Keys, fiction and poetry alongside each other, each feeding the other.
Trained as a historian, she writes with a historian’s patience about ordinary lives under pressure: marriages, friendships, wartime parents, the long consequences of a single decision. And she writes about place as though it were a character, because in her books it usually is: the light on an island, a street in Provence, a Scottish hillside, the Dorset coast of childhood summers.
“I spent 12 years in Scotland, and the landscape does affect the way I write.”
Key West has been her home port since 1992. There she has taught, read, moderated and argued at the Key West Literary Seminar, co-founded the Key West Writers Lab, run poetry workshops for years, and served as the city’s Poet Laureate, an honour she accepted, she said, “in the city of Elizabeth Bishop and Tennessee Williams”. Her monthly Notes on a Writing Life carries the same attentiveness into the present tense: weather, friends, reading, travel, the life around the work.