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Amaryllis at the Fair
Amaryllis at the Fair (first published in 1887) portrays the highs and lows of everyday life on a small, debt-ridden family farm. At Coombe Oaks, Farmer Iden is out in all weathers, planting and sowing; his wife is in the dairy or staving off creditors; and their sensitive, artistic daughter, Amaryllis, is watching it all and praying for salvation. With a host of expertly-drawn minor characters, including miserly Grandfather Iden, loyal George the labourer and dissolute landowner's son Raleigh Pamment, Jefferies gives a rounded picture of a rural community - and in the noble Iden paints a fond portrait of his own farmer father...
- GenresClassics
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1887
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About the author
Richard Jefferies
198 books58 followers(John) Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in late Victorian England. However, a closer examination of his career reveals a many-sided author who was something of an enigma. To some people he is more familiar as the author of the children’s classic Bevis or the strange futuristic fantasy After London, while he also has some reputation as a mystic worthy of serious study. Since his death his books have enjoyed intermittent spells of popularity, but today he is unknown to the greater part of the reading public. Jefferies, however, has been an inspiration to a number of more prominent writers and W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, Henry Williamson and John Fowles are among those who have acknowledged their debt to him. In my view his greatest achievement lies in his expression, aesthetically and spiritually, of the human encounter with the natural world – something that became almost an obsession for him in his last years.
He was born at Coate in the north Wiltshire countryside - now on the outskirts of Swindon - where his family farmed a smallholding of about forty acres. His father was a thoughtful man with a passionate love of nature but was unsuccessful as a farmer, with the result that the later years of Jefferies' childhood were spent in a household increasingly threatened by poverty. There were also, it seems, other tensions in the family. Richard’s mother, who had been brought up in London, never settled into a life in the country and the portrait of her as Mrs Iden - usually regarded as an accurate one - in his last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, is anything but flattering. Remarks made in some of Jefferies’ childhood letters to his aunt also strongly suggest an absence of mutual affection and understanding between mother and son. A combination of an unsettled home life and an early romantic desire for adventure led him at the age of sixteen to leave home with the intention of traversing Europe as far as Moscow. In this escapade he was accompanied by a cousin, but the journey was abandoned soon after they reached France. On their return to England they attempted to board a ship for the United States but this plan also came to nothing when they found themselves without sufficient money to pay for food.
A self-absorbed and independent youth, Jefferies spent much of his time walking through the countryside around Coate and along the wide chalk expanses of the Marlborough Downs. He regularly visited Burderop woods and Liddington Hill near his home and on longer trips explored Savernake Forest and the stretch of the downs to the east, where the famous white horse is engraved in the hillside above Uffington. His favourite haunt was Liddington Hill, a height crowned with an ancient fort commanding superb views of the north Wiltshire plain and the downs. It was on the summit of Liddington at the age of about eighteen, as he relates in The Story of My Heart, that his unusual sensitivity to nature began to induce in him a powerful inner awakening - a desire for a larger existence or reality which he termed 'soul life'. Wherever he went in the countryside he found himself in awe of the beauty and tranquility of the natural world; not only the trees, flowers and animals, but also the sun, the stars and the entire cosmos seemed to him to be filled with an inexpressible sense of magic and meaning.
He was born at Coate in the north Wiltshire countryside - now on the outskirts of Swindon - where his family farmed a smallholding of about forty acres. His father was a thoughtful man with a passionate love of nature but was unsuccessful as a farmer, with the result that the later years of Jefferies' childhood were spent in a household increasingly threatened by poverty. There were also, it seems, other tensions in the family. Richard’s mother, who had been brought up in London, never settled into a life in the country and the portrait of her as Mrs Iden - usually regarded as an accurate one - in his last novel, Amaryllis at the Fair, is anything but flattering. Remarks made in some of Jefferies’ childhood letters to his aunt also strongly suggest an absence of mutual affection and understanding between mother and son. A combination of an unsettled home life and an early romantic desire for adventure led him at the age of sixteen to leave home with the intention of traversing Europe as far as Moscow. In this escapade he was accompanied by a cousin, but the journey was abandoned soon after they reached France. On their return to England they attempted to board a ship for the United States but this plan also came to nothing when they found themselves without sufficient money to pay for food.
A self-absorbed and independent youth, Jefferies spent much of his time walking through the countryside around Coate and along the wide chalk expanses of the Marlborough Downs. He regularly visited Burderop woods and Liddington Hill near his home and on longer trips explored Savernake Forest and the stretch of the downs to the east, where the famous white horse is engraved in the hillside above Uffington. His favourite haunt was Liddington Hill, a height crowned with an ancient fort commanding superb views of the north Wiltshire plain and the downs. It was on the summit of Liddington at the age of about eighteen, as he relates in The Story of My Heart, that his unusual sensitivity to nature began to induce in him a powerful inner awakening - a desire for a larger existence or reality which he termed 'soul life'. Wherever he went in the countryside he found himself in awe of the beauty and tranquility of the natural world; not only the trees, flowers and animals, but also the sun, the stars and the entire cosmos seemed to him to be filled with an inexpressible sense of magic and meaning.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 15, 2016
As long as you don't approach this as a novel, I can't recommend it enough. Part polemic about poverty, part nature writing, part detailed and totally believable character sketches, it can only be described as charming. I enjoyed it enormously and only wished there was more of it.
November 16, 2024
David Garnett called Amaryllis at the Fair "a complete failure as a novel", yet still liked the book for its rustic characters and descriptions, which are based on Jefferies' own memories of boyhood and family life in rural Wiltshire.
Certainly, Jefferies is always ready to interrupt what little plot there is in order to celebrate the pleasures of old-fashioned country victuals - baked apples, mutton cooked on an open fire, fresh swede tops, Goliath ale, and varty-vold potatoes ("thur bean't none as can beat um"). He is also quite happy to pass comments on the characters and events he himself has created, chiding the foolish, pointing out lessons to be learned, and lamenting the state of the world in the bustling 1880s, with London - the "great Babylon of Misery" - coming off worst.
Amaryllis at the Fair is rambling, self-indulgent, but not unengaging...a book better read as a bundle of sketches, perhaps, than as a coherent novel.
Certainly, Jefferies is always ready to interrupt what little plot there is in order to celebrate the pleasures of old-fashioned country victuals - baked apples, mutton cooked on an open fire, fresh swede tops, Goliath ale, and varty-vold potatoes ("thur bean't none as can beat um"). He is also quite happy to pass comments on the characters and events he himself has created, chiding the foolish, pointing out lessons to be learned, and lamenting the state of the world in the bustling 1880s, with London - the "great Babylon of Misery" - coming off worst.
Amaryllis at the Fair is rambling, self-indulgent, but not unengaging...a book better read as a bundle of sketches, perhaps, than as a coherent novel.
January 6, 2015
I must agree with David Garnett that, as a novel, this is a failure. But the beautifully observed descriptions of nature and life on an impoverished late-19th century British farm are exceptionally well done.
February 21, 2024
This is basically 'Scenes from Rural Life' - it reads like the weekly countryside diary in the newspaper, with incredibly detailed snapshots of existence featuring a background cast of characters who sometimes recur and at other times are introduced with equal focus and then never seen again. There is, basically, no plot. The author does such a good job of avoiding all the possible plot clichés that might have occurred, such as the heroine miraculously reconciling her father and her rich grandfather, or being courted by the local farmer on whom she drops a piece of moss, or being pursued, successfully or otherwise, by the local landowner's heir, or finding fulfilment or earning a little money through her artistic talent, that the result is pretty frustrating as a novel; he keeps dangling plot hooks before you and then taking them away again...
The book is full to bursting of lovingly lavish nostalgia for the good old simple country life (it always amuses me to see "19th-century" used in the sense in which its contemporaries actually viewed it, that of ruinous modernity and industrialism), but, to be fair, it's not averse to describing the grinding labour of debt and the degraded condition of the workless and their women, scarcely even seen as female as they trail along the highway. Most of the characters have some redeeming feature, even if that can come across more as inconsistency between vignettes than (as presumably intended) as depth in the writing. But, my goodness, it's like reading Dickens or Victor Hugo shorn of all the famous storylines.
I'm afraid I can see why the book was rejected by the author's existing publishers, as described in the foreword - I'm more surprised that an alternative firm was prepared to take it on!
The book is full to bursting of lovingly lavish nostalgia for the good old simple country life (it always amuses me to see "19th-century" used in the sense in which its contemporaries actually viewed it, that of ruinous modernity and industrialism), but, to be fair, it's not averse to describing the grinding labour of debt and the degraded condition of the workless and their women, scarcely even seen as female as they trail along the highway. Most of the characters have some redeeming feature, even if that can come across more as inconsistency between vignettes than (as presumably intended) as depth in the writing. But, my goodness, it's like reading Dickens or Victor Hugo shorn of all the famous storylines.
I'm afraid I can see why the book was rejected by the author's existing publishers, as described in the foreword - I'm more surprised that an alternative firm was prepared to take it on!
May 22, 2023
Short and to the point
It was fun and short. Likeable characters with some sort of personality that was far better than what I expected!
It was fun and short. Likeable characters with some sort of personality that was far better than what I expected!
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January 23, 2015Rural bliss overshadowed by debt: the impossibility of making ends meet simply by working hard and doing things the right way. Against the odds, a charming and absorbing book.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews