Scottish PEN is the Scottish centre of PEN International, a worldwide organisation committed to promoting literature and protecting freedom of expression. An important strand of PEN’s work is the support of women writers, so often marginalised. Scottish PEN has produced a revised version of its 100 Scottish Women Writers poster. Twelve writers from the poster will be featured as part of the Dangerous Women Project, in a contribution each month by a member of Scottish PEN.
Linda Cracknell is a writer and writing teacher with a special interest in landscape and is based in Highland Perthshire. Her most recent books include Call of the Undertow, a novel set on the remote Caithness coast, and D oubling Back: Ten paths trodden in memory, an account of walks, each of which follow a personal, biographical or collective story. She also writes for radio and is a member of Scottish PEN, helping edit its online magazine, PENning.
Sarah Salway is a journalist, novelist and poet based in Kent. She is the author of three novels (including Something Beginning With), a short story collection (Leading the Dance) and a poetry collection ( You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book). She is an RLF Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and teaches creative writing for the University of Kent and community groups. She’s on Twitter at @sarahsalway.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Hello Jane, I thought I’d write you a message here, this place for chirplers without
feathers. I gather it’s not so long until a ‘Jane’ can be traded for a couple of pints
of porter in the hostelries of Hampshire?
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
As I once said, it is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble, but yes, soon
they will all hold me in their hands, both the prosperous and the humble.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
We have a lot in common.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
*Shudders*. But tell me, how does one cope?
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Get one’s hands seamed with dirt amongst the delphiniums perhaps, or walk
beside hares’ tracks on a winter mountain. That world is moneyless.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
But to be displayed so, to have fingers rubbed over us, to be exchanged for a
pat of butter or a supper fish, this is more than embarrassment. I find I am without
words, and yet I must call it an honour.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Well, after the first fright of my great muckle face I admit there’s a touch of
honour. Though perhaps it’s not wholly mine. To have my words held up to the
light, paused over in transactions for woollen socks or flower seeds or a fish
supper (rather than your supper fish, whatever that was!). For those fivers to
reeshle their way into the grand hotels of Edinburgh, truck-stop services,
corner-shops of Scotland…
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
It is the vulgarity of the placement of one’s image that is the mortification.
Although I suppose, in your case, the vexation is unremarkable.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Not so. I rarely had my photograph taken, avoided lights except those changing,
mysterious ones of nature. I’m shown at a single vain time when I posed as
something I was not – the only photo they could find when I was smooth-skinned
enough I suppose.
JaneAusten@JAontheNote
‘A single vain time…’ Just one? I am breathless. But then,
perhaps, looking at you…
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
I heard, as well, of the cantrip they played on your face, a small disguise?
http://tinyurl.com/hqumwog
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
If it had been my words they changed, then I might have complained more.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
They spun my likeness from east to west, as if each face is symmetrical, and
made the mountains just an inklin behind my vastness. Is that not all back to front
and heelster-gowdie!
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
Is this ‘Twitter-speak’? I must confess myself at a loss.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
At least they pictured you against your lawns and chestnut trees, I suppose.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Hello?
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Still smarting at the mention of your ‘airbrushing’? Apologies if I offended. *red face*
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Or perhaps you’re away for the teapot?
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
I have been ‘googling’. It is one of the many new fashioned words I like to say out
loud. My dictionary grows daily but I have so many questions.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
For example, does one say ‘loll’ or spell the letters out one by one?
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
I can be of no help I’m afraid.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
And tell me, what is this ‘d-list sexpot’ they talk of in the paper you showed me? I
fear though that you may not be the best person to ask.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Ah, you’ve been reading of your very own wee scandal? Not for us to fret over.
Our words and phrases chisel through the centuries. Yours do anyway. Mine was
a passing reputation. At least until now when they seem to want me great! We
had other priorities than sex and marriage did we not?
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
Ah, but there can be no steady reputation without marriage.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Unless one’s name is Jane Austen?
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
You are kind. Marriage, wealth and reputation have, after all, been the
touchstone of my books. And the desire to have them read is I suppose a truth
we must both acknowledge. Otherwise why write at all?
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Writing was just a small part for me. The thing was to look. Sometimes the
looking led to words on a page, sometimes not. The thing was to live too. The
pilgrimages into the hills, to walk barefoot, bare-personned. ‘It’s a grand thing, to
get leave to live.’
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
I have never in my life walked barefoot. Which is something I consider to be a blessing.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Not even on those smooth lawns you court? Let me entice you. It starts with
necessity – the fording of a burn. Then the soles demand the pleasure of grass or
heather or pools of mud on a hot day to sink into and find the cool melting below.
Perhaps this is a form of writing!
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
As I once very cleverly observed, if I do say so myself, what are men to rocks
and mountains? But as a woman, I prefer to listen in on the true concerns of life
and then run to my writing table.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
You to your writing table, me to the high granite crags perhaps! Where the
concerns of human life mean nothing, as you say. And must we be slaves to men
and convention? We can be our own creators!
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
For me, writing is the only way to live. In watching a woman find the perfect lace
accessory, I see a fortune swiftly achieved. And lost again with the error of a
clumsy hat. The wonder of imagination is that I get to preserve these moments.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
You’ll have heard what outraged my contemporary, Mrs Woolf?: ‘This is an
important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an
insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.’
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
But if a woman in a drawing room does not marry, then she is at the mercy of
a brother’s whim. And that is only if she is lucky. I would say to that critic that
the drawing room is the real battlefield.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
The simple things were my fortune. I had the same bedroom all my life. The
same ‘back garden’ to wander in. It only became more intricate, more mysterious
with the knowing of it. My search was for the mind’s own fineness – for education,
to educate others, and in my travels. Men found it queer that I would walk the
hills alone, with my canvas bag and skirt and stick.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
I would find your life, I feel, without spice and flavour.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
For spice, try birch trees, when the rain releases their odour – it’s fruity like old
brandy and one can be as good as drunk on it. And of course they are loveliest
when naked!
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
I find your obsession with naked flesh distasteful, even in private. It is the result
perhaps of too much landscape.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
‘Too much landscape’ indeed! At least ‘my’ note (will they refer to it as a ‘Nan’ I
wonder, like the ‘bob’ or the ‘tanner’?) shows something that money cannot buy –
the light and land of Scotland.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect
refreshment. Now who was it who said that? I wonder.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
There is of course a wee midge on the reverse of the Scottish note, our reliable
summer ‘friend’ (do you know the dearies, perhaps they don’t get as far south as
Hampshire?) and two rolling, slippery mackerel in their glorious stained-glass
jackets. I’m in good company for all my discomfort, passing through thousands of
hands, pockets, till-drawers like a poor, pinned moth.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
Midges and mackerel! At present, I am a treasure to be searched for. I was
painted between heartbeats and my true worth only discovered by a few. It was
what I had dreamt of. But soon…
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
…you will become part of everyone’s treasure!
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
I am accustomed to the smell of old leather, of the apple tinge of foxed paper,
but now I am told I will reek of plastic. That I will be the first to appear on both the
coin and note is, I suppose, compensation.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Ha ha. Dear Jane, quite right – revel in your riches! And I will revel in mine. Is
there some small thing you would like your note – though twice the value of mine
– to pay for?
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
Tell no-one but I once read that in the Pleasure Gardens at Vauxhall, you can
take a night flight in a hot air balloon.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
For myself, with my lower value, I’d buy a pair of stout walking boots for a city
lass, keep her on the ground but also take her high, to lie overnight on a soft
bank of moss on Braeriach.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
If my own money could buy anything, I would like it to purchase one such fanciful
drift over London in the moonlight.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
My young woman would drift awake to the drumming of snipe and find
roarie-bummlers looming darkly.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
The thrill of following the silver thread of the River Thames, to see St
Paul’s dome from so high above, and perhaps even to spy Bath in the
distance.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
She’d spy a widening horizon and have a hunger for a different sort of life as she
walked back down to the city.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
I hear the fashion at Vauxhall is to take a disguise. I could become a
masked pierrot. Or a husband.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Books are more on her mind than husbands. Yes, I’d spend more of my notes on
books for her.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
I may even meet Mr Mark Carney. Have you heard, Nan, of this man?
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Is he one of the chirplers?
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
He is, I believe, the richest man in England. Although his accent is strange.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
And your interest is….is he in want of a wife?
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
Recently, and I blush, he has made almost a declaration. He has talked of me in
front of many others. And praised my importance for the nation.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
Perhaps the same might be said for my poor girl in the future. If there are
sufficient notes, she might also be given a bursary.
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
Poor girl indeed. Perhaps I will leave notes in all my novels across the country, to
be found hiding between pages one hundred and forty four and one hundred and
forty five. They would have to do some reading to earn the fortune.
Nan Shepherd @nanofthehills
What sense and sensibility…
Jane Austen @JAontheNote
You are right, dear Nan. But which of us has the sense and which the sensibility?