Isolated Thoughts

any excuse for a cat picture

Like everyone else, I am in isolation. It means I don’t get off the property day after day. I don’t see anyone, apart from two members of my family here with me, except the postman, from a distance, and my sister who delivers our shopping once a week.

It worries me, which is odd because it’s actually no different to the way I normally live. I’m in the country, down a farm lane in the middle of nowhere, quarter of a mile from the nearest house, a mile from the nearest village, I work from home and someone else does the shopping. I love it. Most days the postman delivers something and occasionally I drive off to see a friend, but otherwise I live in splendid isolation. Now, apart from not being able to see a friend, nothing has changed. So the worry is born solely of the fact that my isolation is now compulsory, not merely voluntary. I am a bit like my cat Mitsy, who will settle anywhere and not move all day, just as long as the door is left open. Shut it and she'll be up and scratching at it. A case of sheer perversity for both of us.

Thinking about it, not only have I embraced isolation for years, but it has also been a major theme in my writing, because a sense of isolation, physical and emotion, is a compelling dramatic theme, a gift for any writer.

 In A Time For Silence, Gwen’s physical isolation, in a cottage in a remote dark valley, amplifies the emotional isolation that traps her, and the isolation of her community also plays a significant part in the story. In Shadows, Kate is isolated, wherever she goes, by the knowledge that she has feelings that no one else shares, and it has raised impenetrable bars around her. In The Unravelling, Karen is isolated by mental derangement (or re-arrangement). Regarded as a freak and pariah, she isolates herself in fiction.

I’m not the only one, of course. Authors have always dwelt on isolation, accidental or chosen, enforced or embraced. Hansel and Gretel, Robinson Crusoe, Dickens' Miss Havisham, Jane Austen’s Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Waugh’s Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, Naipaul’s Salim in A Bend in the River, Gollum, Harry Potter… Could I include Adam and Eve?

Wuthering Heights

Isolated houses are irresistible as setting for novels. Wuthering Heights! Agatha Christie was the mistress of trapping a whole cast of suspects within one country house. I can’t resist isolated houses either. Give me an empty window in shadows and I'm off, whether I'm peering into a tiny cottage like Cwmderwen or a mansion like Llysygarn.


Isolation is not always a bad thing in literature. In my set of novellas, Long Shadows, my medieval girl, Angharad, longs to escape from her suffocating life at Llysygarn and see the world, but finishes up embracing confinement, while the 17th century girl, Elizabeth Bowen, wants nothing more than to be left alone with her isolated house.

I have no real cause to complain about my isolation and as a writer I can feed on it, inflicting it on my characters. But even in the best of times, there are people abandoned in loneliness and people who feel most alone when surrounded by crowds. My sympathy is for all those out there isolated in desperation, anxiety and loneliness, shut up away from family, in homes or hospital wards, trapped in their own heads. We are in territory beyond fiction now.