Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision

Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision provides an illuminating account of one of Britain's best-loved nature writers, the incomparable Richard Jefferies. Lucid and comprehensive the book critically explores the diversity of Jefferies' literary talents, for this Wiltshire naturalist was without doubt a many sided and comprehensive genius. As a prose poet of nature Jefferies, like Thoreau, attempted to combine a vivid empirical naturalism with an extraordinary poetic imagination. He was indeed, as Brian Morris demonstrates, a pioneer ecologist.

Although blessed with some insightful early biographers, Jefferies has been very much a neglected figure, and this study attempts to re-affirm his importance and relevence as a literary naturalist.

Given the diversity of the Jefferies talents the structure of the book largely follows, and critically explores, the many different genres that Jefferies expressed in his writing. An initial chapter outlines Jefferies biography the history of a short life, for Jeffries, like Keats, died of tuberculosis and at the early age of thirty-eight.