A. L. Rowse on Francis Kilvert

“The point about Kilvert is that he was the master of a most exquisite and lovely prose, and the Diary that he kept is not merely a revealing document of the social life of the countryside in his time — it is certainly that — but one of the first half-dozen diaries, and that not the least moving, in our literature.”

“I should place his Diary among the best half-dozen or dozen ever written in England. It is the quintessence of England, and the English attitude to life, to the country, to people, even though most of it, and the best part of it too, was written against that beautiful background of central Wales, the Breconshire Beacons, the lovely mountains and valleys in view.”

“It gives an extraordinarily sensitive and observant picture of country life in the seventies, mostly of Radnorshire and central Wales, where Kilvert was a curate, but also of the west country, for his home was in Wiltshire, and during this year, 1870–1, he visited a good deal in Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset. But, more important, he wrote like an angel; his gift was for prose rather than verse — though his verses are quite charming too. The result is an addition to literature.”

“It is a perfect little landscape, like a Constable, and that is the kind of thing that Kilvert can do on every page. More often, he is rendering life, from close-up observation and with the tenderest, most exquisite sympathy for every sort of human being... It is a world of rural deans, and tea on rectory lawns under the trees, and, after tea, archery or croquet, or picking flowers in the flowery meads of Wiltshire for decorating the church, of pretty Victorian girls looking over the parapet of the bridge while the river flows by. And all the while there is one, a little apart, watching life itself flowing by, trying to catch it on the wing, to ensnare a momentary aspect of its beauty, with what quivering sensibility, with what nostalgia for what is passing, even as it passes, in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase.”