Greene Ferne Farm

At Greene Ferne Farm, in the chalk country of north Wiltshire, Margaret Estcourt is courted by two friends who are also rivals: the ardent, headstrong Geoffrey and his easy-going companion Valentine. Around them move the people of the farm and the village — Margaret's mother and her friend May Fisher, the prosperous old farmers Mr. Ruck and Mr. Hedges in their white smock-frocks, Jabez the shepherd, and the gloriously disreputable poacher Augustus Basset.

The plot is slight and gentle by design, threading through a year of country life and a sequence of set-piece scenes: the gathering up to church, harvest and gleaning in the gold of late summer, nutting in the autumn hedges, a country fray, and a great village feast at the last. At its heart stands the finest sequence in the book — the long night in which the young people are caught out and lost on the open Downs as a storm breaks over them, wandering the trackless high ground in the dark until the light at last comes back.

Published in 1880, Greene Ferne Farm was the first novel by Richard Jefferies — the great English nature writer — to fuse the patient observation of his celebrated country essays with the art of storytelling. Nobody has watched an English field, sky, or season more closely or set it down more beautifully, and the novel's true subject is finally the land itself: the slow rhythms of rural labour, the round of the farming year, the wide bare Downs above the corn.

With its broad Wiltshire dialect, its richly drawn rustic speakers, and its luminous landscape and weather writing, the book is at once a tender country courtship and an elegy for a settled agricultural England now vanished — the work of a writer in love, above all, with the downland of his boyhood.