heart as I read it." After London also influenced M.P. Shiel's post-apocalyptic novel, The Purple Cloud. Final years After Eltham, Jefferies lived briefly in various parts of Sussex, first at Rotherfield, then in a house on Crowborough Hill. In Crowborough Jefferies completed his most ambitious and most unusual novel, Amaryllis at the Fair (1887). Closely based on his own family at Coate, it describes a farm and a family imperceptibly approaching disaster. There is little narrative development; instead significant or typical moments are presented in short scenes or even tableaux. Illness and resulting lower productivity had impoverished Jefferies; and the editor Charles Longman suggested an application to the Royal Literary Fund. At first Jefferies resisted the suggestion, regarding aid from aristocratic patrons not involved in literary work as humiliating: "Patrons of literature! was there ever such a disgrace in the nineteenth century? Patrons of literature! The thing is simply abominable!" Longman finally succeeded in convincing Jefferies that the fund was "assisted by everybody who had made any success in literature". An application was accepted and the committee voted a grant of one hundred pounds. Another fund arranged by Longman enabled Jefferies to move nearer to the sea, at Goring, a suburb of Worthing. There, on 14 August 1887, he died of tuberculosis and exhaustion. He is buried in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery in Worthing. After his death a number of posthumous collections were made of his writings previously published in newspapers and magazines, beginning with Field and Hedgerow (1889), edited by his widow. New collections have appeared since then, but even now not all his writings have been gathered and reprinted. Influence and reputation Early works included three by Henry Stephens Salt: Richard Jefferies: A Study (1894) Richard Jefferies: His Life and His Ideas (1905) The Faith of Richard Jefferies (1906) J. S. Fletcher wrote several novels about English rural life modelled on Jefferies' work, beginning with The Wonderful Wapentake (1894). Jefferies's works inspired Henry Williamson to take up writing; Williamson edited a collection of Jefferies's writings with a title that indicates the great regard that he held for Jefferies: Richard Jefferies : Selections of his Work with details of his Life and Circumstances, his Death and Immortality (1947) Other writers who admired Jefferies included David Garnett, Edward Thomas (who wrote his biography), Leslie Paul, Ethel Mannin, John Fowles, Henry Miller, Raymond Williams, Jeff VanderMeer and Ludovic Kennedy. Canadian poet