Richard Jefferies – författare

Wild Life in a Southern County traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into water meadows and a lake where the wildfowl nest. Immersed in the detail of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats of its wildlife, what emerges from Jefferies' dazzling prose is his sense of perpetual wonder and the deep affection he felt for his homeland, from the clatter of a milkmaid's boots to a pike lying in ambush.

A sudden catastrophe descends upon England, leaving London a pestilent swamp and the rest of the country in a state of wilderness. Meanwhile, the few and scattered survivors revert to a feudal society. Hauntingly beautiful in its descriptions of environmental collapse, this 1906 novel offers an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction.

The Story of My Heart, first published in 1883, is one of the stranger autobiographies in the English language. It describes almost nothing about the writer's life, education, family or work. Opening with a mystical experience on a green hill in the south of England seventeen years before - the date is exact, in a book that is otherwise so exalted above mere facts - it is the record of the author's striving for 'soul-life', for communion with the beauty of nature. In impassioned prose, with echoes of Blake and Shelley, Jefferies relates the history of his feeling of identification with the sun, wind, space and the pulse of natural life. The book is a prayer to the physical world, a pantheistic rejection of modern urban life and technique: 'the sun was stronger than science; the hills more than philosophy'. Some of the most striking passages in The Story of My Heart are descriptions of the controlled chaos of London, which represented for Jefferies the vortex of modern modern human life, a force that is 'driving, pushing, carried on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet'. A neglected classic of English nature writing, The Story of My Heart speaks to today's ecological concerns in the language of another era.