Eighty years after its publication, the Scottish novel generally considered the greatest of the 20th century is to be filmed as a theatrical feature for the first time. Writer-director Terence Davies and producer Bob Last first conceived an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s “Sunset Song” in 2000 after working together on “The House of Mirth.”

A month ago, Davies, 66, didn’t know whether this film or his projected biopic of Emily Dickinson would get the go-ahead, or if either of them would, but it was confirmed yesterday that Hurricane Films and Sweden’s Götafilm would co-produce “Sunset Song.” Hurricane produced “Of Time and the City,” Davies’s poetic, self-narrated 2008 documentary about Liverpool, his hometown, where the company is based.

Last will raise the money for “Sunset Song,” with shooting planned to start near the end of the year in Scotland and Sweden.

Davies didn’t direct a fictional film for 11 years, between “The House of Mirth” and his exquisite adultery drama “The Deep Blue Sea,” which stars Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston and opens on March 23. “Sunset Song” will now be his second movie in two years.

“Sunset Song,” variously posited as a “socialist,” “humanist,” or “feminist” text according to Ali Smith’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, was rapidly followed by two sequels. “Cloud Howe” arrived in 1933 and “Grey Granite” in 1934, the trilogy being known as “A Scots Quair.” An enormously prolific and wide-ranging author, Gibbon died tragically young, a week before his thirty-fourth birthday in 1935, leaving a wife and two young children.

The first novel was adapted by Bill Craig for BBC Scotland and broadcast as a six-part miniseries (see video below) in the UK in 1971 (and by Masterpiece Theater in the US in 1976). Vivien Heilbron, who played “Sunset Song”’s young heroine Chris Guthrie, returned to play her again in Craig’s 1982 and 1983 sequels. Unlike the books, which have an omniscient narrator, Craig’s adaptations are narrated by Chris. Heilbron has noted how the “Sunset Song” series “put [Gibbon] on the school curriculum where he hadn’t been before.”

A microcosmic portrait of agrarian Scotland and a meditation on the national identity, the story begins a few years before World War I when radical social change is coming to the farming communities of the north-east. Chris, initially a 16-year-old schoolgirl, good at her studies, lives in the tiny, tightly-knit community of Kinraddie, in Kincardineshire (or the Mearns), south of Aberdeen and east of the Grampian mountains – a circle of standing stones denotes the settlement’s antiquity.

One of the most remarkable female characters ever written by a man in British literature, Chris is torn between her primal and cerebral selves: “…two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies.” The thought of Davies, so attuned to rendering atmosphere and memory in films like “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes,” directing is a tantalizing prospect.

Because of the family’s financial worries, Chris's pregnant mother kills herself, taking her young twins and Chris’s dream of further education with her. Chris is left with her harsh and bitter father, her brother Will who hates him, and two little ones who are adopted by relatives. Will then peels off to marry and go abroad, and Chris must abide alone with the father, who has incestuous longings for her. There is also a young farm laborer who desires her. Many of the villagers, including the pacifist miller, think that the war in Europe cannot touch them, but it harms most of them in the end.

The coming-of-age story was uncommonly earthy in its descriptions of sexual passion and childbirth (causing it to be banned from some Scottish libraries); it is closer in spirit to the modernist novels of William Faulkner and D.H. Lawrence rather than the romantic Scottish fiction of Gibbon's antecedents Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.

It should, meanwhile, afford Davies plenty of opportunity to make the film with his familiar tropes – static groups of figures welded to their own time and space that make the images in which they appear indelible, the singsongs that celebrate communal experience, the rapturous use of classical music. Gibbon’s novel, which honored his upbringing in the Mearns in the early 1900s as Davies’s films have honored his early life in Liverpool in the late '40s and '50s, seem like a match made in heaven. But only time will tell.

An excerpt from the 1971 "Sunset Song" miniseries