Wild Life in a Southern County

by Richard Jefferies

Overview

Richard Jefferies (1848–1887) remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. He had aspirations to make a living as a novelist, but it was his short, factually based articles for The Live Stock Journal and other magazines, drawn from a wealth of knowledge of the rural community into which he had been born, which when collected in book form brought him recognition (though not wealth), and which continued to be read and admired after his early death. Wild Life in a Southern County, published in 1879, examines the habitats of the Downs and the birds and animals which live there. Written in Jefferies' highly descriptive style, these essays reveal his deep love and knowledge of the countryside. The sense of wonder evoked by the natural world, which permeates all of Jefferies' works, is fully exemplified in this volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517084356
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	08/27/2015
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.29(d)

About the Author

John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 - 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction.Jefferies's corpus of writings includes a diversity of genres and topics, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), an early work of science fiction. For much of his adult life, he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings on the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time.

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. The Downs; 2. A drought; 3. The hillside hedge; 4. The village; 5. Village architecture; 6. The hamlet; 7. The farmhouse; 8. Birds of the farmhouse; 9. The orchard; 10. The woodpile; 11. The home-field; 12. The ash copse; 13. The warren; 14. The rookery; 15. Rooks returning to roost; 16. Notes on birds; 17. Notes on the year; 18. Snake-lore; 19. Course of the brook; 20. Wildfowl of the lake.