Writing by Roger Wood

  Nature writing was huge from about 1870 to 1920 as urban readers realised what they were losing. On Good Friday 1913 Edward Thomas set off from London, cycling westwards in search of spring. Along the way, the places he passed through reminded him of nature writers who had gone before: George Borrow, William Cobbett, George Sturt, Mary Mitford, and – of course, Richard Jefferies whose memorial Thomas visited in, of all places, Salisbury Cathedral. The third of my three monographs,  In Pursuit of Nature Writing , follows in the cycle-tracks of Thomas, exploring how the writers he references influence him and his genre. Through those writers I am able to trace English nature writing all the way back to Thomas Pennant (1726-98), zoologist, friend of Voltaire, Linnaeus and Gilbert White, previously considered to be the founder of English nature prose. (Letters from White to Pennant form the first part of White’s  Selbourne .) Pennant actually came first with accounts of his...

  Available now for Kindle pre-order. Publishing Sept 16 and only 99p - the second of three linked monographs on English prose writing about nature and landscape in the heyday of the genre around 1900. Edward Thomas was only a boy when he discovered the nature writing of Richard Jefferies (1848-87), author of The Gamekeeper at Home and (Thomas's favourite) The Amateur Poacher . It was Jefferies who inspired Thomas to start writing, an enthusiasm which only deepened when Thomas discovered that Jefferies had also lived in South London, having been brought up near Swindon, where Thomas's grandparents lived. In 1908 Thomas wrote a biography of his hero, which for half a century was the prime authority. But there was one book by Jefferies that Thomas could not come to terms with. 'The Story of My Heart' describes a revelation, a religious awakening that overwhelmed Jefferies, aged 18, walking up a hill near Swindon. He underwent a similar experience later, in a very ...