The Story of My Heart, 1883

CHAPTER I: THE STORY OF MY HEART [published Oct. 1883] commences seventeen years ago. In the glow of youth there were times every now and then when I felt the necessity of a strong inspiration of soul thought. My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. ... When this began to form I felt eager to escape from it, to throw off the heavy clothing, to drink deeply once more at the fresh fountains of life. An inspiration―a long deep breath of the pure air of thought―could alone give health to the heart. There is a hill [Liddington] to which I used to resort at such periods. The labour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness accumulated at home. On a warm summer day the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away the sense of oppression.... I began to breathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration. ... Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself.

27 October 2017

Celebrating Richard Jefferies early years at Coate

6 November 2017 marks almost 170 years since the day that Richard Jefferies was born on the family farm at Coate (now part of Swindon). The Richard Jefferies Society [1] is celebrating the occasion with a public meeting [2] to be held at Liddington Village Hall on Saturday 4 November starting at 2.30pm and the publication of the first volume of a new biography [3] of Richard Jefferies that covers his early years living in the Coate area – a time that inspired his writing and which provided his first job as a reporter on the local paper. 


Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is, undoubtedly, the purest and most sensitive, certainly the most passionate, nature writer produced by a country that has always prided itself on the strength of her nature tradition. In his short life he produced an astonishingly rich and varied body of work [4].

Wrote his biographer, the future poet Edward Thomas:

No one English writer before had had such a wide knowledge of labourers, farmers, gamekeepers, poachers, of the fields, and woods, and waters, and the sky above them, by day and night... When he wrote these books—The Amateur Poacher and its companions—he had no rival, nor have they since been equalled in purity, abundance, and rusticity.

Since Thomas’s now classic Richard Jefferies, His Life and Works was published in 1909, a vast amount of material has come to light, and a new biography of Jefferies has been long overdue.  A Peculiarly English Genius: or a Wiltshire Taoist, a Biography of Richard Jefferies, by Andrew Rossabi [5] is the first of three volumes and takes in the years from 1848 to 1867 when such places as Coate Water, Liddington Hill and the Marlborough Downs inspired the young man to write fiction and non-fiction that had a strong autobiographical content. It is also the time when he contracted tuberculosis that killed him at the age of 38.

Andrew Rossabi said

The present biography will extend to three volumes. Whether Jefferies’ is worthy of, or best served by, a book of such length and detail is another matter. I believe he is, although the reader will quickly discover that I am far from being an uncritical admirer.

The hardback book published by the Richard Jefferies Society runs to 800 pages and contains over 30 illustrations. It will be launched at the Liddington Village Hall meeting which is open to the public and free to attend.

 Notes

 [1] The Richard Jefferies Society (Registered Charity No 1042838) was founded in Swindon in 1950 to promote appreciation and study of the writings of Richard Jefferies. http://richardjefferiessociety.org

 [2] More information about the meeting at http://richardjefferiessociety.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/birthday-lecture-4-november-2017.html

 [3] A Peculiarly English Genius: or a Wiltshire Taoist, a Biography of Richard Jefferies, Vol I - The Early Years, 1848-1867 by Andrew Rossabi. (Foulsham: Petton Books, 6 November 2017), 800pp. £40. The critic and scholar Q.D. Leavis (1906-1981) was a great admirer of the works of Richard Jefferies. She wrote ‘Jefferies was a many-sided and comprehensive genius, not merely a peculiarly English genius but one whose interests, ideas, and temperament associate him with other peculiarly English geniuses’ (Scrutiny,  March 1938) – hence the main title of the biography. 

[4] Jefferies wrote as much about people as about wild life, and his series of country books, based on the Coate area, The Gamekeeper at Home (1878), Wild Life in a Southern Country (1879), The Amateur Poacher (1879), Round About a Great Estate (1880), which the critic Q.D. Leavis called ‘one of the most delightful books in the English language’, and Hodge and His Masters (1880), are an unrivalled source for the social history of late Victorian rural England.  Jefferies wrote two children’s books that have become classics, Wood Magic (1881) and Bevis (1882), and a short volume of spiritual biography, The Story of My Heart (1883), saluted by William James as 'Jefferies wonderful mystic rhapsody’.   He wrote five novels of permanent worth including The Dewy Morn (1884), which Mrs Leavis described as ‘one of the few real novels between Wuthering Heights and Sons and Lovers’; After London (1885), a futurist romance much admired by William Morris; and Amaryllis at the Fair (1887), to make room for which the critic Edward Garnett said he would turn out several highly-regarded novels by Thomas Hardy. Jefferies’ many gifts perhaps found perfection in his essays, collected in Nature Near London (1883), The Life of the Fields (1884), The Open Air (1885) and Field and Hedgerow (1889).  


[5] Andrew Rossabi is President of the Richard Jefferies Society, and has written introductions to reissues of several works by Jefferies. A resident of London for many years, he has alternated a career in publishing (he edited Cyril Connolly’s last collection of reviews The Evening Colonnade and J.G. Ballard’s controversial novel Crash) with teaching classics part-time at Highgate School.

Andrew Rossabi