Richard Jefferies – författare

The Collins Nature Library is a new series of classic British nature writing – reissues of long-lost seminal works. The titles have been chosen by one of Britain’s best known and highly acclaimed nature writers, Robert Macfarlane, who has also written new introductions that put these classics into a modern context.Nature Near London is a collection of observational pieces from locations near London at the end of the 19th Century. The depth of knowledge and of familiarity with particular places and particular species gives the impression that each small piece is the product of many years of observation.His style of observation is a work in miniature – cataloguing the most minute details; the dancing of a flower in the wind or the darting of a cautious trout. The chapters centre on a special place, a certain species, geographical feature or habitat – everything from orchards and copses to rivers and streams.Jefferies always explains the typical behaviour of whatever he is describing, and often contrasts what he sees with what one would expect to see in another part of the country, or in a different season. His knowledge of flowers is wide-ranging, and his ability to describe one particular patch of a field in such a specific way brings tremendous variety to the chapters that make up the book.The final chapters are a departure – both from the character of the rest of the book, and from London itself, as Jefferies boards the train to Brighton. Suddenly he is describing people and their relationship to nature, as much as nature itself. The scope widens, less a work in miniature, more surging towards a triumphant end as Jefferies becomes ever more philosophical.100 years on, the book becomes even more relevant than when it was published – as a reminder of the dangers of unrelenting urbanisation, but also the context of the trend that aims to recreate nature where we need it most – around our cities. Nature near London is a portrait of what we’ve lost, and a reminder of nature’s positive and calming influence. Going along with Jefferies is like taking an afternoon stroll out of the city, without having to leave your armchair.

Richard Jefferies was the most imaginative and least conventional of nineteenth-century observers of the natural world. Trekking across the English countryside, he recorded his responses to everything from the texture of an owl's feather and 'noises in the air' to the grinding hardship of rural labour. This superb selection of his essays and articles shows a writer who is brimming with intense feeling, acutely aware of the land and those who work on it, and often ambivalent about the countryside. Who does it belong to? Is it a place, an experience or a way of life? In these passionate and idiosyncratic writings, almost all our current ideas and concerns about rural life can be found.Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) was the son of a Wiltshire farmer. He never worked the land but made his living from writing, trekking across the countryside with his notebook. He spent much of his life struggling against poverty and tuberculosis, which would eventually kill him at the age of thirty-nine. As well as being in many ways the father of English nature writing, Jefferies also wrote the classic children's book Bevis and the apocalyptic science-fiction novel After London.Richard Mabey's introduction to his selection of Jefferies' work discusses the author's life, his views on the paradoxes of rural life and his place in the tradition of nature writers.

The countryside is filled with beauty and wonder in these imaginative, idiosyncratic writings, but also cruelty and hardship. They describe the texture of an owl's feather, the colours of autumn and the sound of rooks' wings sweeping across the sky. Yet here too is the grinding toil of reaping the harvest, and the discovery of a gamekeeper's bloody kill. Brimming with intense feeling, these pieces show an acute awareness of the land, and the people on it.Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

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.

By the Early Holocene (10,000 to 8,000 B.P.), small wandering bands of Archaic hunter-gatherers began to annually follow the same hunting trails, basing their temporary camps on seasonal conditions and the presence of food. The Pleistocene glaciers had receded by this time, making food more plentiful in some areas and living conditions less hazardous. Although these Archaic peoples have long been known from their primary activities as hunters and gatherers of wild food resources, recent evidence has been found that indicates they also began rudimentary cultivation sometime during the Middle Holocene. Richard Jefferies—an Archaic specialist—comprehensively addresses the approximately 7,000 years of the prehistory of eastern North America, termed the Archaic Period by archaeologists. Jefferies centers his research on a 380-mile section of the Lower Ohio River Valley, an area rife with both temporary and long-term Archaic sites. He covers the duration of the Holocene and provides a compendium of knowledge of the era, including innovative research strategies and results. Presenting these data from a cultural-ecological perspective emphasizing the relationships between hunter-gatherers and the environments in which they lived, Jefferies integrates current research strategies with emerging theories that are beginning to look at culture history in creative ways