About Nan Shepherd
To save you trawling through the blog, all my posts about Nan Shepherd (so far) are here, too.
There’s been a revival of interest in Nan Shepherd recently. And about time, too. Famous for her novels and poetry in the 1930s by the 1950s and 60s she had slipped into literary obscurity.
‘That’s what you call a passing reputation’, she said, a twinkle in her eye, to a journalist in 1976.
A year later, she pulled a manuscript out of the drawer where it had been lying since the 1940s and published it. She paid for its printing herself. And although it was moderately successful, there were many who didn’t quite ‘get’ The Living Mountain.
It seems the world has finally caught up with her. Reprinted in 2011, The Living Mountain is now considered a masterpiece. Shepherd has a dedicated paving slab outside Edinburgh’s Makar’s Museum and her face adorns the RBS £5 note.
Who was Nan Shepherd?
But who was this woman who wandered the Cairngorms, often alone, in the 1920s and 30s. Who slept out in the hills, bathing in tarns and walking barefoot on heather.
Why did she give up writing? Was it really true, what she said to that same journalist in 1976: ‘it just didn’t come to me anymore.’
These, and other questions, set me searching for the writer. I found her extremely elusive. Into the Mountain the first biography of the Scottish writer and poet unravels some of the mysteries about her.
But there’s always more to learn. As she says in The Living Mountain:
Knowing another is endless, the thing to be grown, grows with the knowing.
The Living Mountain.
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