The Dewy Morn

Richard Jefferies's The Dewy Morn (1884) is a love story told by the greatest English nature writer of his age. Best known for The Story of My Heart and his classic books of the countryside, Jefferies here turns his rapt attention to the living world upon a human passion — and creates in Felise one of the most original heroines in Victorian fiction.

Felise is a beautiful, vital, free-spirited young woman living on her uncle's farm, drawn from her first appearance as a being wholly at one with nature: pausing in the dew-laden lanes at dawn, alive to every flower and shaft of early light. Into this life comes a single, consuming love. She loves Martial, the proprietor of the neighbouring farm, and loves him with the whole undivided force of her nature. Martial, hurt by an earlier attachment, holds himself back; Felise, with a directness that startled the novel's first readers, does not wait to be courted but pursues the man she wants.

Around this central love Jefferies sets the wider life of the farms and the people who work them — the labourers and households of the countryside whose hard lot he knew at first hand and had argued in print for a decade. The result is an unusual and beautiful hybrid: a romance written by a naturalist, in which a woman's elemental passion, the social plight of the rural poor, and the open beauty of the Wessex downs are all rendered in the same luminous prose, and nature is felt throughout as the deepest reality.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1884 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader.