Radical writer with a mysterious love life who’s the new face on £5 notes
Honoured on a banknote, Nan Shepherd shattered the conventions of her time
WITH her long, thick plaits and jewel studded headband, she is certainly striking. But for many, the beautiful preRaphaelite woman peering out from the new Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note is something of a mystery.
Wild, rebellious and with an intriguing private life, Nan Shepherd was a Scottish writer determined to live on her own terms.
A mountaineer who scaled Scotland’s highest peaks, a bohemian who embraced the hedonistic fashions of the roaring 1920s, she was also a staunch Aberdonian and a trailblazer for Sunset Song author Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Her non-fiction work The Living Mountain has come to be regarded as one of the finest books about the natural world ever written.
Yet while her writing prowess has been compared to that of James Joyce and DH Lawrence, she died in obscurity in 1981 in an Aberdeen hospital and for many years much of her work remained out of print.
Until recently, the only lasting memorial to her writing lay in a quiet corner of Makars’ Court, outside the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. There on an engraved slab is her most famous quote: ‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.’
The decision to feature Shepherd on the new note will make her, albeit posthumously, a household name. Along with scientist Mary Somerville, who appears on RBS’s new £10, she is only the second woman ever to be featured on a Scottish banknote.
The first woman to hold the distinction is Mary Slessor, whose face appeared on the Clydesdale Bank £10 note in 2009. A Scottish missionary to Nigeria who grew up in a Dundee slum, Slessor promoted women’s rights while spreading Christianity in the country.
She focused particularly on saving the lives of twins in the Calabar region of Nigeria, where the traditional beliefs of the native Efik people viewed them as superstitious and cursed.
But while Slessor could be seen as a safe and sturdy choice, Shepherd is perhaps a more risqué one. A sexually ambiguous Buddhist and a pioneer of Scottish feminism, she was little known even during her lifetime, brushed aside by history in favour of arguably lesstalented male writers.
Yet she was a contemporary of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf – an independent woman writing at a time when such an act was considered radical among the fairer sex.
SHE was born Anna Shepherd in 1893 at East Peterculter, into an affluent Aberdeen household. Her father was a civil engineer while her mother came from a wellestablished Aberdonian family. Soon after her birth, they moved to Cults and she remained in the same house for most of the rest of her life.
Shepherd attended Aberdeen High School for Girls and then went on to Aberdeen University – in itself a rarity for the day. Graduating in 1915, she was affected by the rise of the suffragettes, and became a lifelong feminist as a result, often adopting a daringly feminist approach in her lectures at Aberdeen College of Education where she taught for 40 years.
Between 1920 and 1933 she published three novels set in the windswept north-east of Scotland. Her first, The Quarry Wood, appeared four years before Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, and covered many similar themes, not least that of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world against the harsh background of the rural working class during the First World War.
Like Gibbon’s novel, The Quarry Wood features an eyebrow-raising amount of sex, as its protagonist Martha navigates several unfulfilling relationships with men. And, radically for the times, Martha – unlike Sunset Song’s Chris Guthrie – has no wish to marry but simply wishes to be loved.
Shepherd’s own love life remains shrouded in mystery to this day. Like her heroine Martha, she never married and never had children. She undoubtedly had lovers, however.
A prolific poet as well as a novelist, she wrote a number of love sonnets and rumours have swirled over the identity of the lover she addresses in them.
One candidate is a fellow poet named Charles Murray, a First World War veteran 29 years Shepherd’s senior who wrote predominantly in Doric. Another theory speculates that she wrote them after the suicide of another, married lover.
Meanwhile, threaded through her novels is the suggestion that true happiness may have lain beyond a heterosexual relationship. Her dearest friend was Agnes Mure Mackenzie, herself a celebrated writer and historian who died in 1955.
The two first met at the University of Aberdeen when they were both young, bright-eyed undergraduates, and remained close friends until Mackenzie’s death.
Mackenzie relocated several times, living in Edinburgh and then in London. But they wrote to each other frequently, covering every topic under the sun from holidays to financial problems, writing concerns and gossip about fellow authors. Shepherd was devastated at Mackenzie’s death and in response wrote an admiring eightpage ‘portrait’ of her life and work.
Later in life, Shepherd became fascinated by Buddhism and read into it deeply, often likening her trips to the mountains as a Buddhist’s pilgrimage.
It was an interest she shared with her lifelong friend and fellow writer Neil Gunn, and it was Gunn to whom, in 1945, she sent the manuscript to her most famous book, The Living Mountain.
If she had a true love, it was perhaps Scotland’s landscape. The Living Mountain is a love letter to the Cairngorms, a uniquely female piece of writing in a world where most mountaineers, and most writers, were men.
She writes of wanting ‘merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him’.
In a recent documentary, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane described it as ‘one of the most astonishing works of landscape literature I have ever read’.
He said: ‘Shepherd’s prose showed me how little I really knew of the range. Its combination of intense scrutiny, deep familiarity and glittering imagery remade my vision of these familiar hills. It taught me to see them, rather than just to look at them.’
And Shepherd’s writing is exquisite. She describes summer on the high plateau of the mountain range as ‘delectable as honey’. Frogs are compared to ‘tiddly-winks’, a white hare bounding through the snow is a ‘shadow-skeleton’.
But for many years the manuscript lay unpublished after Gunn, while praising the work, told her he was sceptical of her chances of getting it published.
INSTEAD it gathered dust in a drawer for 32 years before finally being published in 1977, only four years before Shepherd’s death. Now she is one of a wave of women to be honoured on banknotes.
A sustained campaign in England in 2013 led to Jane Austen becoming the face on the new Bank of England £10 note.
Last month, anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman, who was born a slave and went on to rescue hundreds of others, became the first woman to appear on a US banknote in more than a century, featuring on the new $20 bill.
Shepherd died, aged 88, in Aberdeen’s Woodend Hospital. She kept her long, flowing hair into old age, and even as an elderly woman would plait it and wrap it artfully around her head.
Until a revival of interest in her work in the past decade, she seemed set – like so many women writers of her age – to be forgotten. Now, with Canongate’s edition of The Living Mountain flying off the shelves and Shepherd’s face adorning £5 notes across the country, a whole new generation is set to discover her writing, and the starkly beautiful landscape it captures.
It is what Shepherd herself might have described as ‘a grand thing’.