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The Story of My HeartAn AutobiographyByRichard JefferiesCOMPLETE NEW EDITIONThe Story of My Heart is an autobiography, first published in 1883, by English nature writer, essayist and journalist Richard Jefferies. It is no true autobiography, but the story of a soul's awakening. Richard Jefferies describes how, leaving aside all the preconceptions of past and future, he placed himself in the eternal Now, and allowed the Now to become his soul's only guide and source of nourishment. Thus freed from the usual blocks to awareness, Jefferies' senses became windows for his soul, through which the natural world could be seen in its true, dazzling brilliance. Jefferies describes how this vision reflected back into his consciousness an awareness of his soul's eternity, and its immense, unquenchable longing and love for what he called 'soul-life'.

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John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 - 14 August 1887) was an English nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels. His childhood on a small Wiltshire farm had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction. For all that, these show a remarkable diversity, including Bevis (1882), a classic children's book, and After London (1885), an early work of science fiction. For much of his adult life, he suffered from tuberculosis, and his struggles with the illness and with poverty also play a role in his writing. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings on the world, gained him the reputation of a nature mystic at the time. But it is his success in conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Walter Besant wrote of his reaction on first reading Jefferies: Why, we must have been blind all our lives; here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not.

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