Book review: Landscape with Figures: selected prose writings, By Richard Jefferies

Forerunner of the "new nature writing", but both more mystical and more political than his heirs, Wiltshire-born Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) had a short, sad but very productive life.

A visionary cross between Thomas Hardy and William Morris, but with a unique, unsettling edge to his prose, Jefferies wrote with troubled grace about rural people - and especially class conflict on the land - as well as the creatures and scenery he loved.

This welcome return for Richard Mabey's pick of essays and extracts reintroduces a great, and fresh, original.