The name of Richard Jefferies is one invoked most often by association, whether with predecessors such as William Cobbett or Gilbert White, with contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy or W. H. Hudson, or with successors such as Edward Thomas or Henry Williamson. His reputation is most assured as the author of two idylls of childhood, Wood Magic: A Fable (1881) and Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882), the prophetic romance After London; or, Wild England (1885), and Amaryllis at the Fair (1887), the best of his largely forgettable novels. His nature essays, which range between the earlier journalistic and documentary pieces and the later, more mystical renderings of natural impression, form the numerically largest component of his published work. The most authoritative bibliography of his published essays, which appears in Landscape and Labour (1979), the most recent of eight posthumous collections (excluding anthologies) that began with Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last...