SHEPHERD, Nan.

£1,850 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Living Mountain. First edition, first impression. Shepherd's deeply personal masterpiece of nature writing is uncommon in the first edition. It has been hailed as one of the "most remarkable twentieth century British studies of landscape" (Macfarlane). WorldCat lists no copies in North American libraries.Shepherd (1893-1981) was born and raised in Aberdeenshire and in all her writing focused on her local surroundings. Written mostly during the Second World War, Shepherd sent a completed draft of The Living Mountain to her friend and novelist Neil Gunn in the summer of 1945. Although Shepherd considered approaching Faber to publish the book and Gunn suggested serialization in Scots Magazine, the manuscript was left in a drawer until 1977. The Aberdeen University Press quietly published the book in this small edition when Shepherd was 84, shortly before she moved to a nursing home in Torphins."Best thought of, perhaps not as a work of mountaineering literature but one of mountain literature" (Macfarlane), it was republished in 2011 and swiftly had a major influence on contemporary nature writing. It has been praised as a classic of the genre by writers such as Anita Sethi, Kathleen Jamie, Richard Mabey, and Ali Smith. Until that point Shepherd was better known for her three novels, The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians, published in a five-year burst between 1928 and 1933. For these, as well as her sole poetry collection, In the Cairngorms (1973), s

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