“The reader who expects a novel will be disappointed.”–  David Garnett in the introduction to Richard Jefferies’s Amaryllis at the Fair (Everyman’s Library)

Certainly I expected a novel, and it is extraordinay. David Garnett bases his criticism on the lack of plot. The book is static, but I glimpsed various plot-lines. What we expect is a Victorian marriage plot: Jefferies sets it up again and again and then swerves away.   But his heroine, Amaryllis Odin, is fan intelligent country girl with no interest in marriage. That in itself makes her extraordinary.

I admired Jeffries’s lyrical style and his description of Amaryllis’s intense relationship to the land. Amaryllis is besotted with country life, and proud of her father, Iden, a hard-working but unsuccessful farmer.  She is ecstatic when she finds the first daffodil of spring, and rushes to show it to him.   Odin loves the land, but he tells her, “Flowers bean’t no use on.” Amaryllis is crushed. She herself is a flower; hence her name.

There is no sense in the Odins’ poverty, but his choice of work set him apart from his class, and he has quarreled with his father.  He spends most of his time hunched over the potato plot, or talking in dialect to other country folk. The latter exasperates his wife, because he is well-educated, and has many career options. Jeffries portrays this cross woman sympathetically: there are reasons for her anger. The family is almost starving. And she is the one who must persuade shopkeepers to supply them with food on credit.  

This enchanting, formless little novel is elevated by Jeffries’s poetic language.

The moss on the ridge of the wall… looked shriveled and thin, the green tint dried out of it.  A sparrow with a straw tried to reach the eaves of the house to put it in his nest, but the depending straw was caught by the breeze as a sail, and carried him past….

 But back to the plot that Garnett thinks isn’t a plot. The marriage plots unfold on the day of the fair. It begins when Amaryllis refuses to ride to the fair with a potential suitor. She insists on walking, much to her mother’s annoyance.  And then, after looking around at the fair, Amaryllis has dinner with her grandfather, who takes her on a walk to meet Hon. Raleigh Pamment at his mansion. Her grandfather praises her beauty to Raleigh as if she were a cow, and she rushes away in a huff during a tour of his portrait gallery. Raleigh runs after her, but she escapes. She is a bit of a socialist. Jeffries writes, “To her the Pamments were the incarnation of everything detestable, of oppression, obstruction, and medieval darkness.”

There is a brilliant sketch of Raleigh, who is likable and appealing, in a comic way.   He spends all day at his desk, studying the sports page and writing telegrams, so he can bet on the races.  The contrast of the cluttered desk with his racing form is very funny, because he appears to be absorbed in respectable business. And then we learn that Raleigh and his friend Freddy have retired to the country manse after a huge bloody fight at a bar in London.  They are wanted by the police, or so they think.  Jeffries suggests that if the people had found him, Raleigh would have been a hero, hailed as Caesar.

This is a series of beautifully-written patoral sketches, woven together loosely. Is it a novel? Of course it is . And if you like Thomas Hardy, you will like Amaryllis, Thomas Hardyish heroine with more choices.