Richard Jefferies's 1883 spiritual autobiography — not a chronicle of events but a record of the inner experience he calls 'soul-life', developed during his solitary walks across the Wiltshire downs. Jefferies argues for a wholly post-Christian mysticism rooted in immediate communion with sun, earth, sea and sky, and rejects every received religious and philosophical framework as inadequate to the felt encounter with nature.
The prose is incandescent and structurally unconventional, closer to a long psalm than to Victorian autobiography. Twelve chapters trace an unbroken arc of soul-seeking from Jefferies's youth on Liddington Hill to his mature conviction that human civilisation has barely begun to understand the depth of life available to those who attend to the physical world without the mediation of religion or philosophy.
I see now that what I laboured for was soul-life, more soul-nature, to be exalted, to be full of soul-learning.
Chapter I
First lines
The story of my heart commences seventeen years ago. In the glow of youth there were times every now and then when I felt the necessity of a strong inspiration of soul-thought. My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge.
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Reception
Treated by Edward Thomas, Henry Williamson, John Fowles, Henry Miller and Rachel Carson as a foundational text of English nature-writing's mystical strain; its influence runs through the entire 20th-century lineage that Robert Macfarlane has more recently inherited. Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams's 2014 expanded edition (with new commentary) restored the book to wider American attention. Critically the book has always sat outside Victorian mainstream — too radical for religious readers, too ecstatic for secular ones — but has remained continuously in print across 140 years on the strength of writer-to-writer recommendation.
Frequently asked
What is The Story of My Heart about?
It is Richard Jefferies's record of the inner experience he calls 'soul-life' — developed through solitary walks across the Wiltshire downs. Not a chronicle of events, the book argues for a wholly post-Christian mysticism rooted in direct communion with sun, earth, sea and sky, rejecting every received religious and philosophical framework as inadequate to the felt encounter with nature.
Why is The Story of My Heart considered a nature-writing classic?
The book stands apart from Victorian autobiography because its subject is not biography but a sustained attempt to articulate a form of consciousness available through deep attention to the physical world. Writers from Edward Thomas and Henry Miller to Rachel Carson and Robert Macfarlane have returned to it as a foundational statement of what nature writing can reach for.
Is The Story of My Heart a religious book?
Jefferies explicitly rejects Christianity and every other existing religion as insufficient to his experience. The book is post-religious in the sense that it takes the impulse behind prayer and worship and redirects it entirely toward the natural world — sun, grass, sea, sky — without invoking deity, afterlife, or doctrine.