Henry Ryecroft is an older English man of letters who, upon inheriting a small legacy, retires to a small cottage in the countryside. There he writes a diary, his “private papers,” which George Gissing purports to have edited and published in this volume.

In reality Ryecroft is a fictional character, and his diary is a semi-autobiographical account of Gissing’s own career as an author and literary critic, and of his personal philosophical musings. His love of nature, the English landscape, and the English national character is evident throughout, though Gissing, in his affection for the rural England of the past, doesn’t shy away from criticizing contemporary society—like the precarious financial situations many intelligent literary men find themselves in.

The Private Papers became his most popular work in his lifetime, though today it has been overshadowed by some of his other books, like New Grub Street . It also gained a surprisingly wide following in Japan at the turn of the 20th century, where its lyrical descriptions of the natural world combined with its simple style made it accessible to students and scholars.