In the spirit of old haunts Janet Reid on a story of Glasgow suffragettes and angst-ridden New Yorkers

In many ways she feels an outsider, even when she comes back to Glasgow, yet there's no doubt where roots still draw their nourishment. The study/work ethic, a sense of purpose, and the importance of family life: her philosophical standpoint is unashamedly Scots and she is determined that her two boys - now two and four - will grow up to think of Scotland as home, even though their wanderings may give them no permanent and long-term fixed abode.

Her weekly column from the Rue du Bac on the Left Bank in Paris revels in ironic reporting of the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities which are the stuff of everyday life in a European capital - baguettes and babies, croissants and cafes, demonstrations and drink. And Suffragette City does the same for New York. Here her protagonist, a thirtysomething artist called Albertine, is part of the generation of women for whom the feminist battles are past history; and though they have everything - education, equality, and opportunity - their crazy, frothy Sex in the City lifestyle leaves them dizzy, discontented, and directionless. Albertine's salvation eventually comes through the ghostly interference and advice of a pioneering Scottish feminist ancestor of a century ago. The book's chapters alternate between present-day Manhattan - wacky parties, millennium hysteria, the search for the perfect mate

- and Glasgow at the turn of the last century where women were fighting battles about serious issues - improving the lot of the poor, and getting the vote.

When she lived in New York, she says, she knew these women. ''There I was, going to all these parties, hanging out with clever women - lawyers, doctors - yet they were all leading this ridiculous, decadent, superficial life and none of them knew where she was going, none of them was grateful for what she'd got, they were all riven by biological time-clock angst. Though I appeared to be part of this crazy scene, really I was coming from somewhere else entirely. I wanted to shake them and tell them to get their act together.'' She thought about doing a book on modern-day feminism but, realising that the issues in women's lives were far more messy and complex than they used to be and that solutions were always compromises, she decided to adopt a different approach and combine the fun of fictionalising her New York experiences - lots of black humour, an engaging heroine, and a galloping plot

- with her long-standing interest in feminism in Scotland at the turn of the last century.

As a student at Glasgow University in the early eighties, where she read jurisprudence and politics, she had discovered the Scottish suffragettes (who have been relatively ignored compared to the Pankhursts and others). She had read a pamphlet by Elspeth King about these radical, independent Scots women, feisty and determined, and she was enthralled by their stories of dedication and sacrifice for issues which they believed in. Footnotes widened her research, and she came across the memoirs of Helen Crawfurd, a shy teenager who married a minister years older than herself, and who eventually exchanged her interest in religion for the fight for feminist emancipation. Her battle took her all over Britain, making speeches, demonstrating, being imprisoned and force-fed. Muir had thought of publishing the diaries as they were: but realising that this wouldn't work, she decided to fictionalise them,

to make up all the personal life left out by Crawfurd. This invented amalgam becomes the ghost - Albertine's great-great- grandmother, Agnes McPhail - whose century-old letters from Glasgow to her sister in India inform, irritate, and then inspire a change of direction for the modern-day New York doll. They provide an affectionate and vivid picture of daily life and feminist political stirrings in the West of Scotland.

We meet on the day Muir flies home to Glasgow at the end of a three-and-a-half-year stint in Paris. Her husband, Ben Macintyre, is about to be posted from there to Washington, and they're taking a few weeks' break with the boys in the family home on West Loch Tarbert. There are lots of things, she says, that she'll miss about Paris - the chats with the baker, the artist in the street, the heart of the city beating right outside their tall windows (the apart- ments there have the same high ceilings as Glasgow flats) the way you can run up huge bills for wine when you're in hospital having a baby - but all the same she's clearly delighted to be on the move again, to once again be starting anew as an outsider and enjoying the freedom of the detached observer.

In a way she's always been a bit

of an outsider. Born and raised in Dalmuir, looking out over the shipyards, she was an only child who was sent to Glasgow to school in Westbourne. Though first destined for law, she soon became involved in student newspapers at Glasgow University and followed her degree by taking a journalism course at Cardiff. Then, after a spell at the now defunct Sunday Correspondent, where she met her husband, she joined the Times. They were both posted to New York. And there, instead of lazy long lunches or feckless idleness, when the time difference and working for British news- paper deadlines gave her space, she used the afternoons to write Suffragette City. The same sense of purpose kept her writing once her children were born.

She has collected so much material, she has so many ideas, she says, that she must use those short hours when the children are at nursery or school. Even during their brief Argyll retreat, the creative urge will have to conform to her children's timetable. The next book, an amoral tale from euroland is already in gestation

and ''Every morning,'' says Muir, ''we're both going to be writing

our respective books before we go out to play. And the boys can absorb a bit more Scottishness: freedom and space, the sea and real weather, the damp and cold draughts of a house whose heating was installed in the twenties.''

n Suffragette City by Kate

Muir is published by

Macmillan at #12.99.