Search results for ""Author Richard Jefferies""

Born in Wiltshire and the son of a farmer, Richard Jeffries had an abiding love for nature and was a prolific writer on the subject. In this collection of beautifully-written essays Jeffries attempts to distill the essence of nature and of life in the country into prose and to impart the wonder he feels when immersed in nature. In all the pieces collected here, a different aspect of the countryside or its people is vividly brought to life, such as when describing the face of an old man as 'twisted like the fantastic turns of a gnarled tree-trunk, hollowed and decayed'. In "The Open Air" Jeffries displays his talent for descriptive writing again and again with crystal-clear descriptions and an emotionally-charged, poetic style.

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Richard Jefferies' After London is uncanny and intriguing, an adventure story, quest romance, dystopia, and Darwinian novel rolled into one, but also a pioneering work of Victorian science fiction. Imagining a mysterious natural catastrophe that plunges its people into a barbaric future, Jefferies remarkable novel drowns and destroys London and depicts a challenging 'Wild England'dominated by nature and filled with evolved animals and devolved humans. Of its time but also distinctively modern, After London can, in its uneasy expression ofVictorian and post-Victorian anxieties about industrial development, urbanisation, natural resources, and climate, be regarded as one of the first novels of the Anthropocene. This new critical edition provides one of the earliest examples of a global catastrophe novel that is part of a flowering of 19th-century science fiction. It situates After London in a tradition of mid-late Victorian texts that respond to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and responds to a host of other key social, political, and cultural issues of the period.

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This new critical edition situates 'After London' in a tradition of mid-late Victorian texts that respond to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and responds to a host of other key social, political, and cultural issues of the period.

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Wild Life in a Southern County traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into water meadows and a lake where the wildfowl nest. Immersed in the detail of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats of its wildlife, what emerges from Jefferies' dazzling prose is his sense of perpetual wonder and the deep affection he felt for his homeland, from the clatter of a milkmaid's boots to a pike lying in ambush.

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