Scottish Authors < SLAINTE (original) (raw)

Anna (Nan) Shepherd was born on llth February 1893. Her father, John Shepherd, was an engineer. She was brought up in West Cults, Aberdeenshire and lived there most of her adult life. She attended Aberdeen High School for Girls, proceeding to the University of Aberdeen from which she graduated in 1915. Thereafter she lectured in English Literature at Aberdeen College of Education until her retirement in 1956. She wrote three novels, The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930) and A Pass in the Grampians (1933); a volume of poetry In the Cairngorms (1934) and a volume of nonfiction The Living mountain, a celebration of the Cairngorms which though not published until 1977, was written in the 1940s. After her retirement she edited the Aberdeen University review. She was awarded an honorary degree by Aberdeen University in 1964. She died in Woodend Hospital, Aberdeen on 23rd February 1981. Nan Shepherd was a great literary encourager. Jessie Kesson benefited from her support. She also corresponded with other literary figures, particularly Neil Gunn who had a similar attitude to the spiritual qualities of landscape. In a letter from 1970 Gunn summed up Shepherd's love of place and her gift for companionship: "I came across some of your old letters. Marvellous ... You're like a lovely day on the hills."

Nan Shepherd's work is an outstanding contribution to the Modernist fiction of Scotland. The Quarry Wood published four years before Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset song, shares the same setting in a small North-East community. However, instead of Gibbon's elegy for a past way of life and the unique style in which he conveys it, Shepherd's fiction, is less pessimistic about the future seeing in the goal of a university education for Martha, the ploughman's daughter, a route to personal freedom. Sadness in Shepherd's fiction is for the restricted lives of women. Martha takes it for granted that she should look after her Aunt Josephine in her last illness although Martha has a full-time job. In The Weatherhouse, Mrs Falconer has never been able to leave her imagination and live in reality at all. She comes to realise this when she is old and her last years are tormented by what she has lost and clumsy attempts to live more authentically. She loses her faith and dies murmuring incoherently about her life. Shepherd is fiercely realistic in depicting the depredations of a confined life, illness and death and their consequences for those who care for the sick. Much of this realism comes from Shepherd's ability to describe and analyse complex emotions. Martha's tragedy is that she falls in love with a married man. Shepherd is able to convey the emotions of love, guilt, desire, and loss in their interminable wranglings in the inner self when the outer self seems composed with a depth of penetration which is reminiscent of DH Lawrence. Shepherd, however, does not solve Martha's loneliness by marriage but through her fostering a little illegitimate boy. Women's capacity to find satisfying emotional fulfilment in relationships other than heterosexual union is also attested by writers as diverse as Jane and Helen Findlater, Willa Muir and Anna Buchan.

Beth Dickson

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