How libraries tried to silence Sunset Song, the nation’s favourite novel
IT has been voted Scotland’s favourite book and Agyness Deyn recently starred in an acclaimed film version which charts a woman’s struggle to farm a croft following the death of her father.
Yet Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song was once banned from the lending department of his local library because it was felt ‘unsuitable’ for general circulation.
Readers were shocked by graphic accounts of sex and childbirth in the narrative when the novel was published in 1932, particularly John Guthrie’s incestuous inclinations towards his daughter, Chris.
By the time Mr Gibbon died of peritonitis at the age of 33 in 1935, the popularity of the novel was beginning to pick up pace, with copies stocked in libraries all over the country.
But the novel, the first of the trilogy A Scots Quair, was withdrawn from circulation at Aberdeen Public Library, and others, because the library committee feared it could corrupt the morals of people living in the community.
Nine copies of the novel were still available to borrow from Glasgow Public Library and it was also available to read at the Sandeman Public Library in Perth.
Yesterday Dr William Malcolm, director of the Grassic Gibbon Centre, set up to celebrate the life of the author in Arbuthnott, Aberdeenshire, said the writer’s widow, Ray Mitchell, was deeply offended by the actions of the library, which were later reversed.
Dr Malcolm, who is working on a biography of the author, born James Leslie Mitchell, said he would have enjoyed the controversy because it was ‘great publicity’.