Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Jefferies, Richard, 1848-1887
He writes again, offering a fourth novel, called "The Dewy Morn;" but as
no more letters follow, it is probable that the work was refused. This
looks as if the success of "World's End" was limited. "The Dewy Morn,"
in the later style, was published in 1884 by Messrs. Chapman and Hall.
The appearance of "World's End" marks the conclusion of one period of
his life. Henceforth Jefferies abandons his ill-starred attempts to
paint manners which he never saw, a society to which he never belonged,
and the life of people concerning whom he knew nothing. He has at last
made the discovery that this kind of work is absolutely futile. Yet he
does not actually realize the fact until he has made many failures, and
wasted a great deal of time, and is nearly thirty years of age.
Henceforth his tales, if we are to call them tales, his papers,
sketches, and finished pictures, will be wholly rural. He has written
"The Dewy Morn," and apparently the work has been refused; there was
little in his previous attempts to tempt a publisher any farther. He
will now write "Greene Ferne Farm," "Bevis," "After London," and
"Amaryllis at the Fair." They are not novels at all, though he chooses
to call them novels; they are a series of pictures, some of beauty and
finish incomparable, strung together by some sort of thread of human
interest which nobody cares to follow.
CHAPTER VII.
IN FULL CAREER.
Never, certainly, did any man have a better chance of success in
literature than Jefferies about the year 1876. He had made himself, to
begin with, an authority on the most interesting of all subjects; he
knew more about farming--that is to say, farming in his own part of the
country--than any other man who could wield a pen; he had written papers
full of the most brilliant suggestions, as well as knowledge, as to the
future of agriculture and its possible developments; he had written
things which made people ask if there had truly arisen an agricultural
prophet in the land. And he was as yet only twenty-eight. Of all young
authors, he seems to have been the man most to be envied. Everything
that he had so long desired seemed now lying at his feet ready to be
picked up. To use the old parlance, the trumpet of fame was already
resounding in the heavens for him, and the crown of honour was already
being woven for his brows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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