Wood Magic - Jefferies, Richard

. .

Résumé :
Bevis lives on a farm near a small lake where he often escapes into the garden and fields where he comes in contact with the country's birds and animals. These creatures and even the stream and wind can speak to him. Part a description of a child's interaction with the natural world, part animal fable as the creatures revolt against the local tyrant magpie, Wood Magic's descriptions of nature, wildlife, and domestic animals are beautifully and keenly observed.

Biographie:
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...

Sommaire:
Bevis lives on a farm near a small lake where he often escapes into the garden and fields where he comes in contact with the country's birds and animals. These creatures and even the stream and wind can speak to him. Part a description of a child's interaction with the natural world, part animal fable as the creatures revolt against the local tyrant magpie, Wood Magic's descriptions of nature, wildlife, and domestic animals are beautifully and keenly observed....