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 is
celebrating the occasion with a public meeting 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 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.
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 is
the first of four 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 four 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.
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.
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| Andrew Rossabi |
