Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd
Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd is the first biography of the Scottish writer and poet best known for The Living Mountain.
Now the face of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s five-pound note, during her lifetime Nan Shepherd faded into obscurity. Yet, in the 1930s she was one of Scotland’s best-known writers.
Between 1928 and 1933, she published three novels: The Quarry Wood; The Weatherhouse; and A Pass in the Grampians. Her volume of poetry, In the Cairngorms, followed in 1934.
Then, in 1977, came the work for which she is most famous: The Living Mountain. A short but powerful reflection on Shepherd’s experiences walking in the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain is now a widely read classic, considered a masterpiece of mountain literature.
Nan Shepherd was an intensely private woman. But Charlotte Peacock has been as successful in finding her way into the life of her subject as Nan herself was in “finding her way into the mountains”.
The book unravels the mysteries, dispels some of the rumours and gives insight into the life and work of this extraordinary writer.
Taking subtle account of Nan Shepherd’s commitment to mystery, and to the virtuous partiality of knowledge; as she could never know the Cairngorms ‘totally’, nor does Peacock set out to know (or tell) Nan Shepherd totally. Rich, wise, subtle and valuable, Into the Mountain is a biography of revelation (by glimpses) in the best sense, rather than ‘exposure’. A clever unfolding of a little-known life and the landscapes in which it was lived.
Robert Macfarlane.
More on Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd
Read reviews in The Guardian, The Spectator, and The Scotsman.
Other works by Charlotte Peacock
Charlotte Peacock is also the editor of Wild Geese: A Collection of Nan Shepherd’s Writing. Published in 2018, it contains a selection of essays, reviews and articles printed in magazines and journals. Included in the volume are several previously unpublished poems discovered during research for Into the Mountain.
