MOST people in Scotland know the name Nan Shepherd, even if they don’t know who she was. Her face – a photo taken in her bohemian youth – now stares out of the Royal Bank of Scotland five pound note.

Born in 1883, Shepherd lived long and published little. Her superlative work, The Living Mountain, was re-released by Canongate in 2011 with an excellent introduction by Robert McFarlane. (His essay serves well enough as an introduction to the author herself.) Her prose meditation on the Cairngorms, written during the Second World War, is content to dwell in and on the massif rather than take the masculine route and scramble up its heights. The book sat neglected for 40 years until it was published in 1977 by Aberdeen University Press. It was at that university where Shepherd taught for most of her life, trying to prevent students from "conforming to the approved pattern".

Canongate has now flung out a new edition The Weatherhouse, one of the three novels Shepherd wrote between 1928 and 1933. It is full of characters who test the limits of "approved" patterns and has something of the philosophical depth of The Living Mountain about it. Set during the First World War in the village of Fetter-Rothnie, in north-east Scotland, it concerns the "secret griefs and endeavours" of this portion of countryside. The community is low on menfolk. If not dead from illness, they are dying in the trenches. The females create a sort of battalion camaraderie amongst themselves.

The house of the title is home to a mother, Lang Leeb, and her three daughters. The main seam of the plot, however, seems to follow the return of a soldier. Captain Garry Forbes wanders back to the village on sick leave from the Western Front. His mind has been shaped by the war, perhaps damaged, and he is left with an off-kilter understanding of time and individuality.

Garry is in love with Lindsay Lorimer, who has a family connection to the Weatherhouse women. On a walk through the woods they meet the local church bore Louisa Morgan, who claims to have been engaged to Garry’s best friend, David Grey, who died from tuberculosis. We find out Louisa is in thrall to the romance of mourning a lost love, having never been loved herself. Garry spends a great amount of time trying to prove Louisa’s perfidy, and among the few who believe him is 60-year-old Ellen Falconer, one of Lang Leeb’s daughters, a woman who has "touched no vital experience other than her own". Ellen is trying to find a way out of her dead-end life, but her desperation is her undoing. She cleaves to Garry, becoming as obsessed with him as he is with proving a petty truth.

The Weatherhouse takes place during the "annunciation of spring", a time of rebirth, but not the wasteland we might recognise from other writing of and about the period. Shepherd writes of these wretched days in a light way. It is a novel sometimes ablaze in light. Characters are often "escaping into light" and the house of Knapperley, home to Garry’s aunt Mrs Patterson, goes up in flames. All Shepherd’s writing is attentive to how the elements change the feel and colour of the land. Walking in the hills, Garry thinks back to when he saw, on his return, the countryside growing out of the darkness: "Now its form was on the point of dissolution into light. And the people whom the land had made – they too, had been shaped from the stuff as hard and intractable as their rock, through weathers as rude as stormed upon their heights; they too (he thought) at moments were dissolved in light, had their hours of transfiguration".

Like Garry’s mind, the novel becomes lost in its own desire to grasp something "essential" and timeless about the world, something beyond a common sense understanding. We are told, almost in an aside, that Garry and Lindsay get on with life somewhere else. The story instead focuses on Ellen. She is the most fey character. As she grows out of herself and away from God she becomes lost in the confusion of her new disbelief.

Shepherd’s first novel, The Quarry Wood, is about a woman’s search for a way out of life’s entrapments. The Weatherhouse is a tragic variation on that theme: Ellen seeks enlightenment through the imagination, through the lives of others. and through the diminution of her own importance. It is a melancholy tale of loss and unease.

The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd is published by Canongate, priced £8.99