Nan Shepherd - Wild Geese: A Collection of Nan Shepherds Writing

by Charlotte Peacock

I dont like writing, really. In fact, I very rarely write. No. I never do short stories and articles, Nan Shepherd confessed in 1933. I only write when I feel that theres something that simply must be written. Certainly, Shepherd was not one to shout for the sake of making noise: her oeuvre is slender. During her lifetime (1893-1981) she published just five major works.

First, between 1928 and 1933, came three complex and remarkable novels: The Quarry Wood ; The Weatherhouse ; and A Pass in the Grampians . Declared Scotlands answer to Virginia Woolf,

Readers and critics eagerly waiting for what Miss Shepherd did next, however, were disappointed. She appeared to have lost her voice. By the late 1960s her books were out of print and she had slipped into literary obscurity. Why, I wonder, did you give up literature so early?, the poet, Rachel Annand Taylor asked in 1959.

But Shepherd had not given up. Like the skein she describes in Wild Geese in Glen Callater, which, buffeted and mishandled by the wind, turned back before disappearing into diaphanous cloud, her flight was merely deflected.

Towards the end of the Second World War something else simply had to be written. An enlightened series of meditations on her beloved Cairngorms, Shepherds last book was ahead of its time. Courteously rejected in 1945, the manuscript lay in waiting for over thirty years, until she decided the world was ready for it. First published in 1977, The Living Mountain is now considered a masterpiece of landscape literature.

You can never know if your work is positively good until youve been dead a century or so, the historian and writer Agnes Mure Mackenzie told Shepherd after the publication of The Quarry Wood. It has taken less than half that time for Shepherds literary legacy to be given the recognition it deserves. The first woman writer to grace a Scottish banknote, all five of her major works are once again in print. A volume of her other writings is timely if not overdue.

During those forty-three years between books, speech did return to Shepherd, albeit intermittently. And despite what she said in 1933, it took the form of a short story and a host of articles. She also produced more verse. Gathered here is a selection of these writings, as well as some earlier pieces. For someone who professed not to like writing, each text, in whichever medium she chooses, reveals her artistry.

Her habit of engaging readers with casually conversational asides Why I should begin by writing of his drollery I hardly know is deceptive.

Her descriptions of the natural world are as vividly wrought. Scotlands blue can be azure thinned outbeaten to a transparency of itself or seems to be substance, lying like the bloom on a plum, or the pile of plush.

Light haunts Shepherds work. In Descent from the Cross, its presence is made tangible:

It was a day so filled with light that the stubble shone and in the

sun-saturated

atmosphere floated gossamers, thistledown and the seeds of

willowherb, airier

than snowflakes, more delicate than moths, as though light had

flaked itself off in filament and frond and brushed their cheeks

Written in 1942, at ten thousand words Descent from the Cross is a long, short story. Readers familiar with Shepherds novels will recognise her trademarks: her use of language English prose and dialect for dialogue; her wit; her compassion for her cast; and a female protagonist challenging convention in a small Scottish community. Like the multi-perspective, layered narratives of the novels, too, Descent from the Cross demands close reading. Then all its surfaces are seen as surfaces, its significance revealed.