John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. Jefferies's corpus of writings covers a range of genres and topics, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), a work of science fiction. For much of his adult life he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings about the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time, but it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: "Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not." Life and works Early life John Richard Jefferies (he used the first name only during his childhood) was born at Coate in the parish of Chiseldon, near Swindon, Wiltshire, the son of a farmer, James Luckett Jefferies (1816–1896). His birthplace and home is now a museum open to the public. James Jefferies had the farm from his father, John Jefferies, who had been a printer in London before returning to Swindon to run the family mill and bakery. Richard's mother, Elizabeth Gyde (1817–1895), always called Betsy, was the daughter of John Jefferies's binder and manager. These relationships are mirrored in the characters of Jefferies's late novel Amaryllis at the Fair (1887); and the portraits of the family in the novel tally with external accounts of the Jefferies. James Jefferies, like Iden in Amaryllis, was devoted to his garden, while struggling to make a financial success of the farm. The garden, lovingly recalled in Wood Magic and Amaryllis, also made a