‘Lead us not into imagination but deliver us from understanding’: The Wayward Poetics of Nan Shepherd's <i>The Weatherhouse</i>

Nan Shepherd's writing is female-centred and imbued with a striking feminine sensibility described in this essay as wayward. Her ‘wayward aesthetics’ present dissenting expressions of femininity which effectively challenge traditional and normative world views, questioning and dissolving the boundaries of our internal and external environments. Employing the disruptive analytical approaches of Jack Halberstam's conception of ‘counterintuitive modes of knowing’ in their notion of ‘the wild’ as set out in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and Wild Things (2020) among other texts, and the bold ecocritical critique of Donna J. Haraway in Staying with the Trouble (2016), this essay analyses Shepherd's richly unsettling novel The Weatherhouse (1930). It argues that read for her wayward literary sensibilities and intimations of ‘the wild’, this text resonates with rich insights into reconceptualizing and revisioning the human condition and relationship with ‘nature’, illuminating Shepherd's purposeful challenge to normative thinking and representation.