The Scottish Literary Renaissance is one of the main contexts for understanding Nan Shepherd’s work. As her correspondence shows, Shepherd was friends with many of the renaissance’s chief protagonists, and, at the renaissance’s highpoint in the 1920s–30s, she published three novels, The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, and A Pass in the Grampians, and a volume of poetry, In the Cairngorms, reinforcing her part in the modernist revival in Scottish literature. Despite this, Margery Palmer McCulloch, in Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959, states that Shepherd merely ‘contributed implicitly’ to the renaissance, and it is true that, even with the recent revival in her literary reputation, Shepherd remains comparatively marginal to contemporary critical accounts of the Scottish Renaissance. McCulloch’s claim, and Shepherd’s peculiar peripherality, rests on definitions of the renaissance as primarily a movement of national political and cultural revival. This chapter, the first extended discussion of Shepherd’s place in the Scottish Literary Renaissance, argues that through examination of Shepherd’s work, we can widen the characterisations of the renaissance to suggest a person-centric form of regeneration that is essentially spiritual in dimension. After a summary of the key debates of the renaissance, the chapter considers Shepherd’s own views on some of the renaissance’s chief figures through readings of her essays on Hugh MacDiarmid (Aberdeen University Review, 1938), Marion Angus (Scots Magazine, 1947), and Charles Murray (1979), supplemented with material from her correspondence (ed. Andrews, 2023). Utilising, too, her novels, poems, and The Living Mountain, the chapter contends that Shepherd’s work eschews the overt politicisation in the work of MacDiarmid to propose instead a quieter form of revivalism: as Shepherd puts it in a letter of 1930, it was her ambition to ‘Irradiate the common’, welding the earthy and the mystical in her work, which opens interpretations of the Scottish Literary Renaissance to a less nation-centric, more universal dimension.
Citation
Lyall, S. To ‘Irradiate the Common’: Nan Shepherd and the Scottish Literary Renaissance. In Nan Shepherd: New Critical Essays. Edinburgh University Press
