No stone left unturned | 1 February 2018

Alan Bennett once defined a classic as ‘a book everyone is assumed to have read and forgets if they have or not’. The Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies 1848–1887 is in the peculiarly unfortunate position of having produced a whole library that falls pretty much into this category. His novels such as Bevis (1882) or the apocalyptic After London (1885) have cult status for some who, almost 70 years ago, had cohered into an active Richard Jefferies’ Society.

New anthologies of his work appear almost every decade and many of the original titles are in print — both Wild Life in a Southern County and Nature Near London were only recently reissued — but fhor many people Jefferies is little more than a name in a lineage of writers that runs from Gilbert White right through to the likes of Ronald Blythe or Richard Mabey.

Yet it is partly because of a later generation of kindred spirits that Jefferies survives at all.