Open Air - Tapa blanda

Born in Wiltshire and the son of a farmer, Richard Jeffries had an abiding love for nature and was a prolific writer on the subject. In this collection of beautifully-written essays Jeffries attempts to distill the essence of nature and of life in the country into prose and to impart the wonder he feels when immersed in nature. In all the pieces collected here, a different aspect of the countryside or its people is vividly brought to life, such as when describing the face of an old man as 'twisted like the fantastic turns of a gnarled tree-trunk, hollowed and decayed'. In "The Open Air" Jeffries displays his talent for descriptive writing again and again with crystal-clear descriptions and an emotionally-charged, poetic style.

Richard Jeffries (1848-1887) gained his first writing experience composing descriptive sketches for the North Wilts Advertiser and then became a regular reporter for the North Wilts Herald. In 1873 he published The Goddards of North Wilts, a piece of family history. The money he received for this allowed him to publish his first novel, The Scarlet Shawl. Returning to newspaper writing he contributed a series of papers on rural life to influential papers, and in 1877 a collection of these from the Pall Mall Gazette were published as Gamekeeper at Home, followed in 1879 by Wild Life in a Southern County. He continued to produce popular books about rural life, but also resumed his fictional writings. From 1881 he was afflicted by a series of debilitating illnesses and during his last two years couldn't hold a pen and was required to dictate his work to his wife.