Sunset Song

Product Information

We follow Chris through late adolescence, love, marriage, childbirth and widowhood over the course of the novel. It suggests that corporal punishment was not traditionally a big thing in the Gaelic west, but rather, was “a new fad” that had been introduced. Notice in the 3 images there (if interested) the article I’ve included by Ronald Black from the West Highland Free Press. My conclusion is that the love I feel for Sunset Song is not just an appreciation of its considerable literary quality; it is as much, maybe more so, a reflection of the profound impact it had on me at a formative time of my life. He wrote it in Welwyn Garden City, of all places, in the first years of the 1930s, and looked back to the countryside he knew as a boy – the rich farmland of the Mearns, just south of Aberdeen, which stretches from the mountains to the sea.

Back then, the rapid development of a Scottish national identity led to the founding of a number of estates including Kinraddie, though the rest of Europe tended to view the country as a brutal, disorganized, and even primal place. Faced with a choice between a harsh farming life and the world of books and learning, Chris Guthrie chooses to remain in her rural community, bound by her intense love of the land. His parents were angry and unsympathetic but there was nothing new in this – it was the story of his childhood. He was fee’d several times and, your account of people rarely moving far from one area in their entire life, reminds me of a story he told of an elderly fee’d worker who lived on one of the farms and had worked on that farm almost all his life. Thank you for pointing out where the blue plaque is – I hadn’t been able to find it on Google Earth !And yet so often I’ve found myself thinking about the fictional Ewan Tavendale; about how the war brutalised him, turning his happy marriage to Chris into a nightmare of abuse and contempt. This has had a massive negative effect not only on farmers but also their workers who depended on them. But that I say it still, more than thirty years and hundreds of great books later, demands more examination. uk/arts/robertburns/works/my_hearts_in_the_highlands/ But given what’s now known about the Lowland Clearances also, and I’d imagine, the East Coast Clearances as feudalism swept in, I wonder if there’s not more to Burns? The Union is reinforced by the intertribal rivalries of the ‘Four Nations’ in, for example, the fields of sport and culture.

This meant a more moneyed class of single tenant farmers and getting rid of cottars, a class of landless peasant below the tenants who assisted the tenants at times of the year when extra labour was needed, but who eked out a living the rest of the year from the product of their kailyard and animals kept on communal grazings.If they didn’t like their current place, they could always upsticks at the end of the quarter term and seek another at the hiring fair. The minister says that something perished with the young men that was older than themselves, “and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips”. Throughout Sunset Song, there is repeated reference to ‘two Chrisses’ as a way of describing the conflict that she carries within her. Most importantly, there is song, ringing out through the natural rustle of wind and bird and harvest, threatening to transform this drama into a musical, that purest of cinematic fantasias (no surprise that Davies cites Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as inspirational).

I understood through her the love/hate – but ultimately love – relationship with the land that many of us feel.She begins a relationship with the new minister, and she watches as he dedicates the War Memorial at the Standing Stones above her home. Her eldest brother, Will, absconds with a girl from Kinraddie, marries her, and moves permanently to Argentina.

Sunset Song can take it, and if Davies’s treatment introduces another generation to Grassic Gibbon, all will be well. Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry. When Carol wrote her important book on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) I tweeted this: https://bit. My sister though remembered a different man, in happier times, when he would dandle us on his knee and sing us songs to amuse us. Fine words in defence of the Garden City, not just a town but an ideal, a movement even, with a better life for all as it’s goal.I experienced the reflective and healing resonance of character – the ability of a made-up person on a page to help us better understand our own lives; to make us feel less alone.