The Story of My Heart is a book first published in 1883 by English nature writer, essayist, and journalist Richard Jefferies. The book has been described as a "spiritual autobiography" where Jefferies idealises the English countryside as a sort of utopia. The book and its themes have been compared to the transcendentalist movement. [1] The scholar Roger Ebbatson considers that the book's "speculative" spiritualism is emblematic of the decline of Christian belief in the more empirical Victorian era. [2] Critical reaction to the book was mixed. A new edition of The Story of My Heart published in 2014 notes that the American conservationist Rachel Carson had two copies of the book at her bedside, but others found the work "barely comprehensible". Edward Wilkins Waite RBA (14 April 1854 - 1924) was a prolific English landscape painter. Waite was born in Leatherhead, Surrey, the son of the Rev. Edward Waite, MA, and his wife Cleopha Julia (née Dukes) - there were six sons and two daughters in total. His grandfather William Watkin Waite was a miniaturist, his father an amateur watercolourist, and three of his brothers - Charles, Harold and Arthur - also became artists. He was educated at the Mansion House Grammar School in Leatherhead. In 1874 he travelled to Ontario, Canada, to work as a lumberjack. On his return he took up painting as a profession, exhibiting often at the Royal Academy, London, from 1878 to 1919. He also exhibited at many other major galleries, in London and the regions, and became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA) in 1893. In 1891, Waite married Barbara Isabella Tait (1862-1950). They had one son and two daughters. They lived at Peaslake and Abinger Hammer, in Surrey, before moving to Woolhampton in Berkshire in 1910. They moved back to Surrey and then East Sussex in 1915. Waite died in Fittleworth, Sussex, in 1924. Waite was a landscape painter and worked in oils. Much of his output depicts rural scenes in his native Surrey....... 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. Jefferies's corpus of writings includes a diversity of genres and topics, 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.".............