Buchan, Elizabeth (Mary)

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BUCHAN, Elizabeth (Mary)

PERSONAL:

Born in Guildford, Surrey, England; daughter of Peter Charles (an army officer) and Eleanor (a homemaker) Oakleigh-Walker; married Benjamin Buchan (a publisher), April 20, 1974; children: Adam, Eleanor. Ethnicity: "British." Education: University of Kent at Canterbury, B.A. (with honors; English literature, history), 1971. Politics: "Floating." Hobbies and other interests: Walking, opera, gardening, theater.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Mark Lucas, LAW Agency, 14 Vernon St., London W14 0RJ, England.

CAREER:

Writer. Penguin Books, cover editor, 1971-88; Random House, London, England, commissioning fiction editor, 1988-93.

MEMBER:

British Society of Authors (management committee member, 1999-2003).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Parker Romantic Novel of the Year award, Romantic Novelists' Association, 1994, for Consider the Lily.

WRITINGS:

Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit (biography), Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1987.

Daughters of the Storm, Macmillan (London, England), 1988, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1990.

Light of the Moon, Macmillan (London, England), 1991.

Consider the Lily, Crown Publishers (New York, NY), 1993.

Perfect Love, Macmillan (London, England), 1995, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Against Her Nature, Macmillan (London, England), 1997.

Secrets of the Heart, Penguin (London, England), 2000.

Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

The Good Wife, Penguin (London, England), 2003, published as The Good Wife Strikes Back, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

That Certain Age, Penguin (London, England), 2004.

Contributor of short stories and reviews to periodicals.

ADAPTATIONS:

Secrets of the Heart was adapted for audio cassette, read by Eve Matheson, Chivers Press; Consider the Lily was adapted for audio cassette, read by Lindsay Duncan, HarperCollins, 1995; Daughters of the Storm was adapted for audio cassette, read by Lindsay Duncan, HarperCollins, 1996; Light of the Moon was adapted for audio cassette (twelve cassettes), read by Stella Gonet, Chivers Audio Books, 1996; Perfect Love was adapted for audio cassette, Chivers Audio Books, 1996; an unabridged version ofAgainst Her Nature was adapted for audio cassette, read by Stella Gonet, Chivers Audio Books, 1998; an unabridged version of Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman was adapted for audio cassette and CD, read by Jean Gilpin, Penguin Audiobooks, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

English writer Elizabeth Buchan is the author of Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit, a biography for children that delves into Potter's childhood, including facts about her family, childhood pets, friends, and her happiness living on her farm with her husband, William Heelis. Since then, she has written several historical/romantic novels.

Buchan's first novel, Daughters of the Storm, takes place during the French Revolution. The second, Light of the Moon, set in 1940, finds the protagonist, Evelyn St. John, being recruited as a secret agent, a path that leads to love with a German intelligence officer.

Consider the Lily is set in England during the 1930s and 1940s. Plain Matty Verral was orphaned as a child and raised in London by her aunt, Susan Chudleigh, whose own daughter, Daisy, is beautiful and vivacious. Both young women fall for Kit Dysart, a handsome but poor Englishman they meet while on holiday in the south of France, and it is Daisy to whom Kit responds. But Daisy has no fortune, and when Matty offers to share hers with Kit if he will marry her, he agrees. Matty also tells him he is free to lead his own life, which includes his continued obsession with Daisy. They move to Kit's beautiful family home, where Matty, who discovers she cannot conceive, occupies herself by renovating the abandoned garden. It is in the garden that Matty has occasional visions of a ghostlike child, and as time passes, hidden family secrets begin to surface.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote that Consider the Lily contains an "absorbing romance, well-drawn, sympathetic characters, vivid evocation of the beauties of English gardens and country houses—plus a nice filip of the supernatural." According to a Books reviewer, Consider the Lily is "a haunting love story played out between three people and woven into the life of an English country house" that "celebrates marriage, and coming to terms with loss. It rejoices in flowers and their history. Unusual and poignant, this is a beautiful novel of England between the wars that will enchant readers of Elizabeth Jane Howard and more: It will put a new definition on the 'romantic novel.'"

In Perfect Love, forty-one-year-old Prue Valour is married to a man twenty years her senior. She and Max have a child, and she has led a contented life in their village, caring for her family and writing a biography of Joan of Arc. The calm is shattered when Max's daughter, Violet, returns from the United States with her husband, Jamie, and their baby. Violet, who dominates Jamie, has never accepted Prue, and doesn't even care for her own child. Jamie and Prue, who are close in age, become attracted, and their affair brings Prue sexual satisfaction she has never before experienced.

A Publishers Weekly critic said that "the often stifling responsibilities of marriage and family life and the lure and complications of adultery are subtly and movingly explored." Furthermore, the reviewer noted that in showing how a woman goes on after the passion of marriage is gone, Buchan "avoids sentimentality and easy answers."

Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman is Buchan's tale of Rose Lloyd, devoted wife of Nathan and mother of two children in their twenties. Rose is a book editor for a London newspaper, and Nathan is deputy editor of a paper owned by the same group. Nathan has an affair with Rose's young assistant, Minty, whom Rose has mentored and befriended. Rose loses her husband, her job, and the house into which she has put so much care and love. Her mother suggests that she didn't pay enough attention to Nathan, and her daughter, Poppy, is furious with her father. Rose's severance pay will carry her for a little while, but too much time alone leads her to seek solace in alcohol.

Robin Vidimos reviewed Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman for the Denver Post, writing that "it would be easy to turn Rose's story into a fantasy of revenge, like Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, or a feminist awakening along the lines of The Women's Room by Marilyn French. But what makes Buchan's take on the situation so appealing is that she sidesteps the expected plot devices."

Instead of seeking revenge, for example, Rose tends to her garden and to relationships with friends and neighbors who need her. An old love reenters her life in the form of American Hal Thorne, now a well-known travel writer. Vidimos described Rose as a "three-dimensional woman, not a stereotype, and she's a character that grows on the reader while she grows into a new stage of her life." Rose also visits Paris, buys new clothes, and becomes friends with a cabinet minister who is facing problems of his own.

USA Today's Deirdre Donahue wrote, "Women who love gardens and felines will find this book absolute catnip" and felt that "to Buchan's credit, Nathan's quest for happiness is treated neither as laughable, incomprehensible, nor pathetically goatish. Instead, it is an inchoate expression of an authentic yearning for something new before old age, the walker, and death." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman "a wry and elegant tale about a woman of a certain age fighting back and winning unexpected victories."

Buchan told CA: "Without a doubt, childhood shapes a writer, and mine, without piling on too much agony, was just right for the nurturing of a writer, as I was lonely, cross, and hungry at a boarding school, because my parents lived abroad. Reading anything and everything was a natural recourse, and I determined that I, too, would be this grand and wonderful thing: a writer. However, I sensed that I was the sort of person who would benefit from patience and observation, and I would have to wait in order to find the powers.

"This I did until my youngest child was five or six. Only then did I sit down at the typewriter and embark on the long, perilous, complicated, but intensely interesting and exciting journey of learning to write. Put at its simplest, I wanted to write the books that I would like to read. Put more boldly, I wanted to create books that have an afterlife, which climb up into the reader's head and take root after the final page has been read. I wanted to be nourished, provoked, entertained, and educated in the widest sense and to be given comfort and pleasure, as well as stimulus. This is a tall order and with each book, I try to achieve these objectives."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1999, Ellie Barta-Moran, review of Perfect Love, p. 1789; January 1, 2003, Carrie Bissey, review of Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman, p. 844.

Books, March-April, 1993, review of Consider the Lily, p. 10.

Denver Post, February 9, 2003, Robin Vidimos, review of Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1993, review of Consider the Lily, p. 951; December 1, 2002, review of Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman, p. 1713.

Publishers Weekly, August 23, 1993, review of Consider the Lily, p. 59; June 21, 1999, review of Perfect Love, p. 54; December 23, 2002, review of Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman, p. 46.

Times (London, England), May 24, 1995, Julia Llewellyn Smith, "The Over Forties Want to Be Allowed to Have Sex Lives Too," p. 15.

USA Today, February 12, 2003, Deirdre Donahue, review of Revenge of the Middle-aged Woman.