AETERNUS Verlag

Life and work

John Richard Jefferies

1848–1887

The fields of Wiltshire, and the world beyond them.

Jefferies looked closely at a country within walking distance. Fields, hedges, labour and the movement of animals became the materials of a prose that could pass from observation into speculation.

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John Richard Jefferies
Richard Jefferies. Frontispiece to Walter Besant’s The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies, 1888. ↗

Editions at AETERNUS

The books reveal the range between the precisely seen countryside and the landscapes the mind builds from it.

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Bevis (Annotated)

AMBER

Bevis (Annotated)

A packing-case becomes the beginning of a project. A brook becomes the Mississippi. Bevis and Mark give the countryside new names, build and equip their craft, and set out for islands whose remoteness grows with every plan.

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Wood Magic (Annotated)

AMBER

Wood Magic (Annotated)

Bevis has questions to ask the creatures in the garden, and the creatures have a great deal to tell him. A magpie rules a kingdom, birds dispute their rank, and the affairs of the countryside extend far beyond the business visible from the farmhouse door. The boy listens, wanders, interrupts, and discovers how much can happen within the reach of a short expedition.

Forthcoming

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Life and work

A life in context

The nature essay is only one part of his work. Bevis imagines childhood’s freedom; After London asks what might follow the collapse of a civilisation.

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Origins and early years

He grew up at Coate in Wiltshire. The farm and its surrounding countryside supplied a durable store of observation, though his writing continually outgrew a purely local subject.

The course of a life

Journalism and essays opened into several literary forms. During his short life he wrote about agriculture and rural society as well as the inward life and imagined futures.

The literary work

The Story of My Heart is an exploration of inward experience; After London transforms familiar terrain into a strange future. The observer of an English field was also an inventor of worlds.

The legacy

Jefferies offers an attentive, restless form of nature writing. His local knowledge makes the larger imaginative departures more remarkable.

A life in dates
  1. Born at Coate, Wiltshire
  2. Bevis
  3. The Story of My Heart
  4. After London
Historical sources and further reading

Further editions