Nan Shepherd once remarked that with prose fiction she only wrote ‘when I feel that there's something that simply must be written’. Her sense of what ‘must be written’ produced three novels within a five-year period and a collection of poetry called In the Cairngorms (1934). After this creative burst, undergone in her late thirties, she published no further fiction. Her last book, The Living Mountain, was written in the years towards the end of and after the Second World War, but it was not published until 1977. This volume celebrated the experience of climbing and hilbwalking in the Cairngorms, one of Nan Shepherd's life-long pleasures, and here, as in her poems, it is possible to identify the passionately metaphysical strain which underlies her creative prose and her sense of the nature of existence itself. It is this aspect of Nan Shepherd's work which I want to explore in this chapter, but it will be helpful to consider first - if only to move beyond - the substantial social and biographical foundations to her fiction, and her acute sense of the life of women in rural Scotland during the first twenty years of this century.

It is difficult not to make connections between Shepherd's personal history and some aspects of the lives of her characters. Her fiction displays a very strong feeling for the experiences of women, both young and old, who have learned to strike a balance between challenging and accepting the roles allocated to them by society. All three novels take this question on hand, and although none of them are entirely radical in their solutions at a social level, the final focus of the work goes beyond the social to discover a wider and more disturbing realm of absolute being - a realm which is wholly integrated with the material world, and yet one in which the familiar novelistic distinctions of character, place and gender seem to dissolve into insignificance. In particular this seems to me to be the final burden of Nan Shepherd's second novel, The Weatherhouse which is, I think, her finest book.

To begin at the beginning, however, let us start with the social world and The Quarry Wood. Published in 1928, this Bildungsroman draws on Nan Shepherd's own experience of Aberdeen University and Teachers’ Training College and the countryside around Cults where she lived all her life.