"Sunset Song" was written by James Leslie Mitchell, 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon'(1901-35) who was born and brought up in the area of Arbuthnolt where his father rented a croft(Bloomfield). Throughout the novel it provides a description of life in the first two decades of the century by the evocation of change and the intensity of its prose. Large themes are tackled in the novel through the story of Chris growing up in the first world war.
             Lewis Grassic Gibbon created one of the most convincing female characters of Scottish fiction and so sympathetically, so inawardingly that normal readers thought that he might be the non-de-plume of a woman author. Sunset Song is the most celebrated book of Gibbons trilogy. The novel celebrates a notion through a religion; its farm folk are of the Mearns, but they are also typical Scots: their words are felt as Scots words, not those of a regional dialect.
             Divided by her love of the land and the brutal harshness of farming life, Chris chooses to live in the rural community of her childhood. Yet the First World War and the economic and social changes that follow make her a widow and mock the efforts of her youth. Although the days of the small crofter are over, Chris symbolises an intuitive strength which, like the land, endures despite everything. Chris belongs to herself, both before and after marriage and she tells us there are "three Chrisses"-Chris Guthrie, Chris Tavendale and another who approaches at the end of the novel: and Chris herself is split into two, the Scots Chris of her family who loves the land and the smell of the honey suckle, and the more refined "English" Chris created by her schooling. This notion of the two Chris' is the central-never resolved tention within Chris. Throughout the novel, the readers are convinced that no man would ever posses Chris quine completely, though her heart is Ewans forever. Traumatically when Chris unexpectedly fell pregnant to Ewan, we share ...