SOURCE: "Some Nature Writers and Civilization," in Essays by Divers Hands, n. s. Vol. XXX, 1960, pp. 1-18.

Here, Williamson surveys Jefferies's life and discusses his development of two distinct styles.

It is not always immediately apparent to the very young writer that a man's thoughts, and particularly his ideals, arise indirectly from the circumstances of his early environment. Truth has many relatives. And at the end of a life, as Heine the German poet wrote, 'Under every gravestone an entire world lies buried.'

Lacking the views of maturity in my youth, when first I read Richard Jefferies's The Story of my Heart, it was to me a revelation of total truth. Indeed, within the first few moments of taking up a copy, in a second-hand bookseller's shop in Folkestone, a month or two after the fighting had stopped on the Western Front, my entire outlook changed. A...