Nan Shepherd, the Scottish poet and nature author whose vivid reflections on her treks by the Cairngorms have introduced posthumous acclaim, is well known in a brand new play that goals to unravel the thriller of why her masterwork remained unpublished in a drawer for 30 years.
Shepherd is recognisable to many from her hanging pose on the Royal Financial institution of Scotland’s £5 notice after previous Jane Austen by a 12 months to develop into the primary feminine author on British paper foreign money. Whereas she loved bursts of public recognition in her lifetime, it’s since her loss of life in 1981, and the 2011 republication of her seminal meditation on the Cairngorm vary, The Dwelling Mountain, that she has reached a worldwide viewers.
“It’s a rollercoaster from full movie star to utter neglect,” mentioned Dr Kerri Andrews, who edited Shepherd’s correspondence for publication final 12 months and labored on the play, Nan Shepherd: Bare and Unashamed, which is directed by Richard Baron, and co-produced by Pitlochry Competition theatre and Firebrand Theatre Firm.
Shepherd, who was born within the village of West Cults, close to Aberdeen, in 1893, had established her literary status by her early 30s with a trio of modernist novels, exploring girls’s shifting roles in rural communities, that drew comparisons with Virginia Woolf.
Then adopted a set of poetry, Within the Cairngorms, and The Dwelling Mountain, accomplished through the second world struggle, which “went right into a drawer” – as she later described it – for greater than three a long time after a writer’s rejection.
“She had enormous early success within the 20s and 30s along with her poetry and novels, with individuals studying and writing about her. Then it’s like she drops off the face of the Earth,” mentioned Andrews.
“However after all she doesn’t. She writes to the poet Hugh MacDiarmid that she had “gone dumb”, however she had different issues in her life – her educating and lectures, her help for youthful writers, like Jessie Kesson. She had a lifelong dedication to Scottish literature.”
Charting vital episodes and relationships in Shepherd’s life, the play endeavours to mirror all these aspects of the writer, instructor, hillwalker, good friend and lover.
There are contradictions, too, mentioned Baron. She travelled broadly and browse deeply, from Marx to Buddhism, however solely ever lived in the identical village. “She had a rebellious nature, going out on her personal into the hills, and likewise engaged in a love triangle along with her finest good friend’s husband. She was doing issues outdoors of what you would possibly anticipate from a middle-class instructor.”
There may be nonetheless a thriller as to why the manuscript languished for thus lengthy, and what prompted Shepherd to resurrect it in 1977, when it was quietly printed by the College of Aberdeen, the place she is remembered for giving theatrical lectures on literature properly into her 80s.
One idea is that she was irritated by a headline on a remaining interview she gave to an area newspaper, labelling her as “the genius who gave up”. Others recommend that Shepherd, an intensely personal girl who discovered fulsome reward discomfiting, somewhat relished her retreat from the highlight and arm’s-length function of mentor.
However her choice to lastly publish The Dwelling Mountain cemented her legacy. Shepherd was additionally a author of unfettered sensuality – luxuriating within the senses and detailing bodily pleasure at a time when girls weren’t inspired to share such experiences so candidly. In The Dwelling Mountain she describes “dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a scrumptious contact, cushioned and clean; so has lengthy grass at morning, sizzling within the solar, however nonetheless cool and moist when the foot sinks into it, like meals melting to a brand new flavour within the mouth”.
She additionally suggests “a way more humble, equitable and mild approach of interacting with nature”, mentioned Andrews, “that isn’t macho or about climbing the best peaks”.
As Shepherd herself put it: “To goal for the best level just isn’t the one option to climb a mountain.”
