[6] Shepherd remained unmarried, due in part to the massive death toll of the First World War, which had an important demographic impact on her generation.

[3] In her mid 50s she withdrew from the literary scene, but remained a friend and a supporter of other Scottish writers, including Neil M. Gunn, Marion Angus and Jessie Kesson.

Her first novel, The Quarry Wood (1928) has often been compared to Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published four years later, as they both portray restricted, often tragic women in rural Scotland of that time.

[9] Her third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians (1933), concerns the departure of a teenage girl from a rural community for the big city.

[4] Shepherd's fiction brings out the sharp conflict between the demands of tradition and the pull of modernity, particularly in women's lives.

[13] Its functions as a memoir and field notes combine with metaphysical nature writing in the tradition of Thoreau or John Muir.

[15] Annabel Abbs retraced Shepherd's steps through the Cairngorms for her book, Windswept: Walking in the Footsteps of Trailblazing Women (Two Roads, 2021).

In the years between the publication of In the Cairngorms and The Living Mountain, Shepherd placed articles and essays in magazines and journals, including the Aberdeen University Review and The Deeside Field.

The best-known image of Shepherd is a portrait photograph as a young woman wearing a headband and a brooch on her forehead.

Whilst sitting for it, she picked up a length of photographic film, wrapped it round her head on a whim and attached a brooch to it, making her look like a Wagnerian princess.