John Richard Jefferies was an English nature writer who lived from November 6, 1848, to August 14, 1887. He was famous for writing stories, essays, and books about natural history that showed how people lived in the English countryside. His childhood on a small farm in Wiltshire shaped him a lot and is the setting for all of his big works of fiction. Jefferies wrote a lot of different types of books and about a lot of different subjects. Some of his most famous works are the classic children's book Bevis (1882) and the science fiction novel After London (1885). For most of his adult life, he had tuberculosis. His struggles with the disease and with being poor also show up in his work. Jefferies valued and worked on having strong feelings about the things going on around him. In The Story of My Heart (1883), he goes into more depth about this work. People at the time thought of him as a nature mystic because of this work, which was an introspective look at his thoughts and feelings about the world. But what most people admire about him is how well he writes about nature and people in it, both in his fiction and in collections of essays like The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880).
Introduction Edward Thomas
1. Choosing a cow
2. Skating
3. Marlborough forest
4. Village churches
5. Birds of spring
6. The spring of the year
7. Vignettes from nature
8. A king of acres
9. The story of Swindon
10. Unequal agriculture
11. Village organization
12. The idle earth
13. After the county franchise
14. The Wiltshire labourer
15. On the Downs
16. The sun and the brook
17. Nature and eternity
18. The dawn.
