Landscape and Women: Can politics hold a legitimate voice in nature writing?
- EPOCH
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
Maggie Langford | Anglia Ruskin University
Climate, nature, and environmentalism are words that can ignite both passion and concern. Concepts including eco-criticism and eco-poetics float on the periphery of more dominant theories such as ecology, science, and environmental land management.
Twentieth century writer Nan Shepherd pioneered this belief, and modern writers Kathleen Jamie and Amy Liptrot share it today. Their observations of the natural world become crucial for considering each writer’s relationship with the landscape and its non-human inhabitants. Shepherd wrote in The Living Mountain, published in 1977, about a ‘continual traffic between the outer landscapes of the world and the inner landscapes of the spirit’ and how they are connected. In a recent interview, Jamie considers the power dynamics of the human and non-human where she stresses the importance of acknowledging the complete and utter dominance that humans have over other living things. This she argues, gains momentum as ‘one species has complete furtherance over all other species’ thus creating an imbalance of power.
Nature writing can, in many ways, start to address this imbalance by allowing the non-human world to find a voice and this can be achieved most effectively through interpretation. Jamie asserts how ‘noticing’ itself becomes a political act. At the heart of this superlative is the idea that humans need to move beyond an anthropocentric position and begin to lose the précis that they are the most important beings and instead start to think beyond self. Most significantly, climate change exists as a worldwide crisis fuelling political debates that have been exacerbated by human folly and greed.
Writer and biographer Charlotte Peacock in her introduction to Wild Geese, A Collection of Nan Shepherd’s Writing, published in 2018, notes how ‘water, woods, rocks, plants, pools and peaks permeate throughout her poems and prose’. In this sense, it becomes important to consider Shepherd’s book as a re-evaluation of sorts. This will help re-map her work more prominently as an influential text during an emerging renaissance. Shepherd’s landscape was Scotland’s northeast, where she lived all her life. It had been a lifetime consumed by environment, non-humans, and nature. She had studied post-graduate-level modules in the history of geology and environmental sciences at Aberdeen University where she taught as an English lecturer.
It becomes important that a reconsideration of Scottish literature by women must become relevant and accepted by mainstream culture. This will allow more women to promote robust political viewpoints and create stronger affiliations with their readers. In the twenty-first century those neglected and marginalised female writers of the past must become recognised as powerful influences and no longer sidelined. Further research into the historical language and culture of Scottish writers and how they are presented would reinstate many of these forgotten voices. Today this remains a valid and significant point. Reading the history of Nan Shepherd, it becomes clear that she lived during a period of parochial exclusion. Female Scottish writers of the early twentieth century had tended to become marginalised by a patriarchal elite.
Today we envisage Shepherd as a modernist writer who, like Virginia Woolf, recognised how subtleties of language could help convey a sense of unease within this new modern world. Most of Shepherd’s work, including her prose and poetry, had become so obscure by the late twentieth century that she had become relatively unknown in her native landscape. She had become an absent voice and appears to have suffered a treble-edged marginalisation; that of being a woman, that of being Scottish, and that of writing in the regional northeast.
Viewed as an eco-feminist text, Shepherd’s nature writing becomes an important contribution to twenty-first-century literature in which the environmental conditions she describes attribute to the author’s life reinforcing the influence of place on the imagination. Eco-feminism therefore stems from an acknowledgement of connections and the reciprocal relationship between humans and the land.
From a psychological perspective, the links between nature and mental well-being are equally important. In Liptrot’s memoir The Outrun she reveals how mindfulness and wellbeing are cultural attributes that we need to nourish. Writing The Living Mountain during the turbulence of the Second World War, Shepherd appears to be searching for answers to the social and political unrest that surrounded her daily life. Like so many of her contemporaries she felt conscious of a changing world and held deep concerns about her place in the community in which she lived. These journeys in and through the Cairngorms become for Shepherd a kind of sacred pilgrimage elevated by her spiritual philosophies and beliefs.
Scottish poet and prose writer Kathleen Jamie also recognised the limitations placed on women’s writing. Much of her work encompasses a wide and diverse range of award-winning poetry and prose. Begun in the early 1980s, Jamie’s poetry collections have been followed by a collection of non-fiction work that has recently focussed on what is generally termed nature writing. More recently Jamie has edited a collection of essays culminating in an anthology Antlers of Water incorporating writers and scholars who focus on a Scottish backdrop. Following on from her success with Findings in 2005 Jamie presented a second text entitled Sightlines in 2012, the same year that her acclaimed book of poetry The Overhaul was also published, thus consecutively producing a selection of both prose and poetry. In a similar format to Findings, her subsequent emergence into essay form in Sightlines often deliberates and connects with wider philosophical, ethical, and scientific investigation. In a focus on eco-feminism it seems important to consider Jamie as a political voice when reading her innovative and thought-provoking essays. Jamie has in recent interviews specified how nature writing can offer political awareness of how the non-human world is controlled by human intervention and how writing can become a form of political protest.
As in the work of Nan Shepherd and Amy Liptrot, this is a writer looking for connections within humanity and the non-human environment, but in a distinct and unique way. Jamie is more of an investigator, an explorer of the landscape and the human mind. Her writing elicits information from so many sources; some exciting and some mundane, whilst simultaneously devouring such knowledge and information to produce her own individualistic perspective. Jamie’s journey is often solitary, yet she includes those individuals or groups of people whom she meets along the way. In Findings and Sightlines, the author is writing at midlife, her experience and reaction to the natural environments are thus reflected from a mature outlook. There are no frills or hyperbolic tendencies, just fluid narratives that share her perceptions of the precarious life cycles of the natural world.
One aspect of exploring the work of Jamie is to understand whether her writing is relevant today, and if so, why. It becomes important, therefore, to identify the significance of Jamie’s work from a historical perspective. During her earliest conceptions of writing Sightlines, Jamie had immersed herself in reading Shepherd’s text The Living Mountain and had been struck not only by its poetic resonances but also by its clarity and precision. The two women share many similarities: both are modernists, innovative, and forward-thinking in their approach to writing. Each chapter of The Living Mountain creates a style that conforms to the essay style, with its concentration on various aspects of nature. Jamie’s writing often follows a similar trajectory to Shepherd, whilst also gently moving towards a more definitive and subtle ecological feminism. I consider both texts as becoming influential in the way they can promote and encourage environmental awareness within a plausible land ethic.
For Amy Liptrot, landscape and environment are also crucial themes in her book The Outrun. She writes candidly about the traumatic events that led to a period of rehabilitation leading to her eventual return to the Northern Isles. Whilst living in London, Liptrot had suffered intermittent periods of alcoholism that had affected her ability to rationalise or retain any sense of reality. Alcohol had become addictive, and this had exacerbated her lack of control over basic everyday living. After an extremely violent attack during a late night out in London, Liptrot began her recovery process, attending a rehab course aimed specifically at alcoholics. It was whilst living in London that she began to question her own sense of belonging and this represented a recurring theme throughout the text. It is a concept that both Nan Shepherd and Kathleen Jamie embraced within their respective books. Through language and observation, Liptrot hopes to situate her sense of place with a renewed connection with the landscape itself.
As an emerging writer Liptrot was included in Antlers of Water. The anthology edited by Jamie will become important in establishing whether there is a distinct Scottish renaissance in Scottish nature writing. Jamie clearly explains in a recorded interview how she had felt it important to include writers from varying and diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, thus Liptrot fitted perfectly into this category. The Outrun often becomes a vehicle in which the younger writer can define her style and attempt a biographical testimony of her life in Orkney and London which runs parallel with a deep and abiding questioning of society itself. This modern author appears to test the boundary between authority and freedom, between self-will and determinism to assess if her relationship with society and the natural world could be compatible with each other.
The author deftly considers how the exploitation of the land generates alarm and disquiet amongst environmentalists. In The Outrun, Liptrot assesses how detrimental actions have impacted the Scottish landscape, predominantly from corporate manipulation. Man-made advancements in agriculture and farming were highlighted as being equally controversial, with the debate surrounding the economic production of food for the masses. This notion conflicted with the destruction of natural habitats for wild birds and species, such as the corncrake. In this sense, Liptrot echoes concerns and worries expressed by Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain.
Shepherd had witnessed the felling of trees in huge swathes of land in and around the Cairngorms in the early twentieth century and had herself often contemplated the viability of land clearance on such an epic scale. Old crofting communities had begun to disappear. From a historical perspective, all three writers delve back into these old communities to consider lost ways of living. Crofting in essence remains part of Scotland’s culture. In this sense, Liptrot, Shepherd, and Jamie are all concerned with man’s relationship with the land and its inhabitants and how this special bond would need to be re-configured for future sustainability. Throughout their writing exists a crucial juxtaposition between old and new. In Liptrot’s narrative she reveals a nostalgia for the old ways as she views desolate scenes along the shorelines where the remains of ‘horse bones’ are a visible reminder of the past. The horses had been shot to make way for new tractors. Yet, there is evidence of survival. As two Clydesdale horses graze on her father’s field she reflects how the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir had imagined ‘strange horses coming back to the landscape after a future apocalyptic event’. Similarly, Liptrot had also returned to this rural landscape after her own very personal kind of trauma.
The question remains whether nature writing can provide a legitimate voice for eco-critical and political debate and will continue to be a difficult question to answer. By considering the texts offered by Shepherd, Jamie and Liptrot it is hoped that they could have some positive impact. Literature and ecology are beginning to sit very nicely together. Jamie and Liptrot are certainly becoming more confident and vocal in their writing and will hopefully continue to follow the aspirations set by Shepherd.
Intertextually literature, poetry and ecology may start to be considered as a science of belonging with a reconnection to the more than human - yet nature writing has a purpose and can become relentless in its moral assertions for change.
Further Reading:
Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines (Sort of Books, 2012)
Kathleen Jamie, Antlers of Water (Canongate, 2020)
Amy Liptrot, The Outrun (Canongate Books Ltd, 2018)
Nan Shepherd, Wild Geese: A Collection of Nan Shepherd’s Writing, eds. by Charlotte Peacock (Galileo Publishing, 2018)
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, (Canongate, 2011)
Having completed an MA in Literature, Maggie went on to study a Post Graduate Teaching Creative Writing course with the Institute for Continuing Education at Madingley Hall. In 2022 Maggie was shortlisted for the Working-Class Nature Writing Competition and in 2023 a Monologue on William Morris took third place in the John Pickard Essay Prize. This was published in the Spring Edition of the Pre-Raphaelite Review, volume XXXII, number 1, Spring 2024. History and literature remain influential in her writing as she explores the lives of twentieth century artists, photographers, and writers.
