Another Song at Sunset: Jean Baxter, Scots poet and friend of Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Sunset Song, once voted Scotland’s favourite novel, is dedicated to Jean Baxter, but who was the woman who helped inspire the character of its heroine, Chris Guthrie? Jean was born into a farming family in rural Aberdeenshire at the end of the nineteenth century, and grew up in the village of Echt, where Doric, the language of north-east Scotland, was still widely spoken. Exiled by marriage to the south of England, Jean began writing vernacular poetry to recapture the people and places of her childhood. Her volume of Doric verse, A’ Ae ’Oo’, was published in 1928 and gained her a substantial reputation amongst enthusiasts for the Scots language. In 1929 she was introduced to a fellow Scottish writer in exile, James Leslie Mitchell. Jean encouraged her talented young friend to write a Scottish novel, seeing an opportunity for something that was neither depressing realism nor cosy ‘kailyard’ fiction. The result was Sunset Song, published under the pen name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. This biography by Jean Baxter’s granddaughter draws on fragments of memoir and unpublished letters to tell the story of Jean’s life and includes her poems in an appendix.