Amber · Youth, adventure, character
1848–1887
The wind went seawards, and the stars are always over the ocean.
Born on a Wiltshire farm in 1848, Jefferies wrote about the English countryside with an attention to weather, water, and work that few writers have matched. Bevis turns that attention to a boyhood.
AMBER
A packing-case becomes the beginning of a project. A brook becomes the Mississippi. Bevis and Mark give the countryside new names, build and equip their craft, and set out for islands whose remoteness grows with every plan.
Explore the edition →Life & context
Jefferies began as a local reporter in Wiltshire and made his name with essays on country life for London papers. His books on the farmer, the gamekeeper, and the poacher record a rural England in the middle of change.
He died at Goring-by-Sea in 1887, aged thirty-eight, after years of illness.
Bevis: The Story of a Boy appeared in three volumes in 1882. Bevis and his friend Mark rename the fields and waters around them, build a raft and a boat, and sail for islands that grow more remote with every plan.
The adventure is imagined; the place is not. Wind, weed, and the working countryside set the limits of every day's ambition.
AETERNUS gives the complete text of the first edition of 1882 in one volume, with five reconstructions, a glossary of thirty terms, an author profile, and an afterword.
