Three Monographs (3)

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 various trips around Wales, Scotland, Ireland, London, Chester and so on. He broke really new ground with his description of being up Snowden in a thick fog.

My three monographs about English country writing in its heyday are currently available for pre-order on Amazon Kindle. They will be published on Monday September 16. They are each fully annotated, have their own bibliography - and only cost 99p.

For more information, click here.

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Three Monographs (1)

Available now for Kindle pre-order. Publishing Sept 16 and only 99p - the first of three linked monographs on English prose writing about nature and landscape in the heyday of the genre around 1900. Edward Thomas was something of a prodigy, publishing his first nature book when he was only 19. Obviously a lower middle class boy from Wandsworth didn't manage an achievement like that unaided. He had a significant mentor in James Ashcroft Noble, who posthumously also became Thomas's father-in-law. Noble was a significant writer, critic and journalist in his own right - up to his death he was publishing in the famous (and notorious) Yellow Book . One of those Yellow Book essays most certainly had an effect on his protege. This was the cautionary tale of the Scottish writer Alexander Smith who became an overnight poetic sensation, compared with Byron, only to have his reputation crushed by a vindictive critic. Rather than hiding in shame, Smith reinvented himself as a

Three Monographs (2)

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

Writing by Roger Wood

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