The Hills and the Vale

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. The Hills and the Vale, first released in 1909, contains a collection of published and unpublished essays and articles. Written in Jefferies' highly descriptive style, these essays describe rural life and nature in England, illustrating folk traditions and important natural events in rural communities. 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:	9781517084233
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	08/27/2015
Pages:	122
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.26(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

Introduction Edward Thomas; 1. Choosing a cow; 2. Skating; 3. Marlborough forest; 4. Village churches; 5. Birds of spring; 6. The spring of the year; 7. Vignettes from nature; 8. A king of acres; 9. The story of Swindon; 10. Unequal agriculture; 11. Village organization; 12. The idle earth; 13. After the county franchise; 14. The Wiltshire labourer; 15. On the Downs; 16. The sun and the brook; 17. Nature and eternity; 18. The dawn.