INTRODUCTION TO THE 

 WILDWOOD HOUSE EDITION 



The Open Air, published in 1 885 , was the last selection 

 from Richard Jefferies's non-fiction writings to 

 appear in his Ufetime. He was thirty-six at the time, 

 and already chronically ill with the lung disease that 

 was to kill him two years later. Perhaps he had some 

 premonition of this, for the selection (presumably 

 made by Jefferies himself) gives a strikingly honest 

 and comprehensive picture of his later work. His 

 journalistic output was prolific in the mid-* 80s, and 

 the essays included in The Open Air are taken from 

 an assortment of nine different publications, from 

 the Times and Pall Mall Gazette to the English 

 Illustrated Magazine, The result is that Jefferies 

 appears - accurately, as it happens - as something 

 of a chameleon and a coUagist. There is the jobbing 

 writer, turning his hand, when it was asked or ex- 

 pected of him, to slight pieces on bathing beauties 

 and sporting guns. There is the masterly descriptive 

 writer in, for instance, * Haunts of the Hare', who 

 could construe a landscape so thoroughly in terms of 

 the patterns of light and line that it is a wonder he did 

 not take his sketching more seriously. There is, in 

 rhapsodies Hke *Wild Flowers', a trace of the mystic 

 who two years previously had published The Story of 

 my Heart, 



