The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography

2020 Reprint of the 1912 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "The Story of my Heart is not an autobiography in the ordinary sense of the word, as it contains no history of the events of Richard Jefferies' life. It is not concerned with his birth or marriage, his actions, nor fortunes, but is an outpouring of Jefferies' innermost soul. Like many others, he found himself at odds with the world. He saw the beauty of the land, the grandeur of the sea, the interest of life - above all of human life - but he was not satisfied. He longed for more beauty, a fuller grandeur, a deeper interest. This feeling completely mastered him, and in The Story of my Heart he poured out with what strength and what skill he possessed the intensity of his longing." - C. J. Longman. The book has been described as a "spiritual autobiography" where Jefferies idealizes the English countryside as a sort of utopia. The book and its themes have been compared to the transcendentalist movement. Other Transcendentalist themes concerning rapturous union with Nature can be found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and John Muir. The scholar Roger Ebbatson considers that the book's "speculative" spiritualism is emblematic of the decline of Christian belief in the more empirical Victorian era. Critical reaction to the book was mixed. A new edition of book published in 2014 notes that the American conservationist Rachel Carson had two copies of the book at her bedside, but others found the work "barely comprehensible".