Kilvert's Diary

Kilvert has touched and delighted and (mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published. New readers are in for a treat
One of the most enchanting portraits of English rural life ever written...Kilvert's lyrical nature writing is recognised for its Wordsworthian sensibility * Guardian *
One of the best books in English * Sunday Times *
Funny, lyrical, witty and wise, Robert Kilvert’s diaries are a treasure-house of vital fieldwork and social observation. Parochial is the best sense, he joyed in the natural wonders of his parish, recording the trials and splendours of his day-to-day. As such, the diary is a marvel of observance; a hybrid hymn to a world now lost and a vibrant counterpoint to fellow poet-cleric, Gerard Manley Hopkins
The best picture of quiet vicarage life in Victorian England that has yet been given to us
Each page, each entry is luxurious and at the end of reading these nearly 500 pages, the book is already battered with folded corners marking passages that are so warming or funny or beautiful that I want to read them again. Instead of being shelved with the nature writers, Robert Kilvert now sits tightly on my poetry shelf near to John Clare and Edward Thomas where he belongs and where he is available to be dipped into over and over again. It is beautiful.
Diarist, churchman, nature lover, and neighbour, Francis Kilvert inhabited a time and a place unlike any other. From the pages of his carefully crafted diaries emerges a world of shepherds and parlour maids, aristocrats and hermits. A snapshot of rural Britain at the height of the Victorian period, acutely observed and lovingly told.
When we read Kilvert’s Diary today, we can imagine ourselves restored to a vanished Arcadia, to a world of beauty and peace, where only the threshing machine and steam engine puncture the countryside’s silence, to a society where the ties of community are still interdependent and strong… The diary is the best example I know of a literary panacea. Its spirit is imbued with the joy that Kilvert found in his surroundings, a feeling of wonder -- Mark Bostridge * Daily Telegraph *