Nan Shepherd

Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) is the author of The Living Mountain, a short book about the Cairngorm mountains of northeast Scotland that lay unpublished for over thirty years and has since been recognized as one of the masterpieces of nature writing in English. Her belated fame — the book’s rediscovery in the twenty-first century made her a literary phenomenon — is one of the most remarkable stories of posthumous reputation in British letters. Her face now appears on the Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound note.

Life and Career

Anna Shepherd was born on 11 February 1893 in Cults, Aberdeenshire, and lived in the same house for her entire life. She studied at Aberdeen University, graduating in 1915, and taught English at Aberdeen Training Centre (later Aberdeen College of Education) for over forty years. She never married. Her life, by external measure, was uneventful — but her inner life, and particularly her relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which she walked for over fifty years, was extraordinarily rich.

She published three novels in quick succession: The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930), and A Pass in the Grampians (1933). These are modernist novels of Scottish rural life — quiet, psychologically acute, attentive to landscape and to the inner lives of women constrained by social convention. They were well received but reached small audiences, and after 1933 Shepherd published no more fiction.

The Living Mountain was written during or just after World War II but was not published until 1977, when Aberdeen University Press issued it in a small edition. The book is a meditation on the Cairngorms — not a hiking guide or a conquest narrative but a sustained act of attention to the mountain environment: its geology, its water, its light, its plants and animals, its weather, and the ways in which walking in the mountains transforms the walker’s perception. The prose is precise, sensuous, and philosophical, influenced by Zen Buddhism and by Shepherd’s own practice of what she calls “a knowledge not of the self but of the not-self” — a letting-go of ego in the presence of landscape.

The book was rediscovered by Robert Macfarlane, who wrote an introduction for a Canongate reissue in 2011. It became an unexpected bestseller and is now widely regarded as one of the finest nature books ever written — comparable to Thoreau’s Walden or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but more radical in its refusal of narrative and more mystical in its understanding of the relationship between mind and mountain.

Key Works

• The Quarry Wood (1928)
• The Weatherhouse (1930)
• The Living Mountain (1977)

Collecting Shepherd

The Living Mountain first edition (Aberdeen University Press, 1977) had a very small print run and is now a significant collectible — $300–$1,000+. The three interwar novels in first edition (Constable) are rare and increasingly sought after: $200–$600 each. The 2011 Canongate edition with Macfarlane’s introduction is the common edition. Shepherd was not a public figure and did not sign books for collectors, making any authenticated signed item extremely valuable. Her poetry collection In the Cairngorms (1934) is also very scarce.