SOURCE: "Richard Jefferies and the Naturalistic Peasant," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 3, December, 1956, pp. 207-17.

In the following essay, Hyde examines Jefferies's portrayal of peasant life in his writings.

Never famous among the ranks of the English rural novelists, Richard Jefferies nevertheless possesses a handful of ardent admirers, whose acclaim of his rural realism encourages an analysis of his achievement in the rural scene. Both Edward Thomas in his study of Jefferies [Richard Jefferies, 1938] and Edward Garnett in his introduction to Amaryllis at the Fair [1908] offer high praise of Jefferies' treatment of rustic characters; both insist upon a certain superiority that Jefferies possesses over Hardy, whose "highly-praised novels," to the latter, "do not ring quite true." Thomas makes the point of realism predominant in his comparison:

[The rustics] appear and reappear with a truth which hardly any English writer has given to agricultural labourers. Jefferies does not go...