Before her death, Elizabeth Kilvert removed all references to herself, and many to his ill-fated affair with Ettie, from her husband's diary. This amounted to the excision of two lengthy sequences, the first from September 1875 to March 1876, the second from June 1876 to the end of 1877; it is more than likely that she also destroyed a final part, dealing with the months leading up to their marriage in August 1879. The diary halts suddenly on March 13 1879, but since Kilvert was continuing to write poetry of a personal nature as late as the end of May (his final poem foretells that "his songs will soon be o'er") it is reasonable to assume that it possessed a concluding section which no longer exists. Published in three volumes in 1938, 1939 and 1940, Kilvert's Diary was immediately acclaimed. As a piece of social history, it was considered to be as significant as the novels of Thomas Hardy - an exact contemporary of Kilvert's, and linked tenuously to him through their mutual friends, the Moule family - in documenting the vanishing rural life of 19th-century England; while, in certain respects, the diary appeared to run counter to perceived notions of the Victorian age. Where, for instance, was its prudery when a country parson was able to bathe naked on a public beach without suffering from any apparent inhibitions? Or when the subject of venereal disease formed part of a discussion at a ruridecanal conference? Not surprisingly, too, Kilvert's enchanting portrait of the country parish was seen as an emblem of a way of life under threat from the prospect of a Nazi invasion (Peter Alexander, Plomer's biographer, has described Plomer himself in flight from the Blitz at a house in Worthing, ensconced in the conservatory, contentedly eating mulberries with his aged father while correcting the proofs of the third volume).

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the first publication of one of the most enchanting portraits of English rural life ever written. In 1937, the poet and novelist William Plomer made a momentous discovery in a pile of manuscripts at the offices of Jonathan Cape in Bedford Square, where he worked as a reader. His attention was seized as soon as he started to read the contents of two bound Victorian notebooks, filled with a spiky sloping script that was difficult to decipher. The complete text, from the first entry in January 1870, written when Kilvert was curate at Clyro in Radnorshire, to the final one in March 1879, by which time he was the incumbent of Bredwardine in Herefordshire, came to well over a million words. Plomer decided to winnow it by about two thirds. "It simply creates that really unknown and remote period," he enthused to Elizabeth Bowen as he began work, drawing lines in red crayon beside paragraphs which were to be omitted. "I showed a bit of it to Virginia [Woolf]: she was most excited. I have insisted on editing it for myself . . . But it's going to be a great deal of work, especially for some poor typist, who will probably be driven blind and mad." In particular, Woolf applauded the comic perfection of the scene at Kilvert's cousin Maria's funeral in Worcester cathedral where, in a sequence of brilliant descriptive strokes, the pallbearers are depicted staggering under the weight of the "crushingly heavy" coffin, which threatens at times to topple over and kill or maim them. Kilvert's lyrical nature writing was recognised for its Wordsworthian sensibility. Kilvert had relished his connection to Wordsworth through his friendship with the Dew family of Whitney Court, overlooking the Wye. Mary Dew was related to Wordsworth's wife, Mary Hutchinson, and the subject of the Wordsworth sonnet "To the Infant M.M.". Kilvert's art in capturing life on the wing - that uncanny ability, as VS Pritchett noted, of his eye and ear seeming always "to be roving over the scene and to hit upon some sight or word which is all the more decisive for having the air of accident" - also provoked comparisons to Hopkins and Proust. "For some time," Kilvert remarked in 1874, with self-conscious artistry, "I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering, glancing, tumbling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. It was 'dazzle'. The dazzle of the poplars." The association between Robert Francis Kilvert and Bredwardine was all too short. He ministered at St Andrew's Bredwardine from November 1877 until his untimely death on September 23rd 1879. From what he wrote in his diary, he appeared to have been enjoying his "living" in Bredwardine with its ancient church and comfortable vicarage overlooking the River Wye, but he died at the age of only 38 years from peritonitis, just a week after returning to Bredwardine from his honeymoon with his wife Elizabeth Ann (nee Rowland). It was during this period that he began courting Elizabeth Rowland. Unlike Ettie, with her "true gypsy beauty", the future Mrs Kilvert was rather plain, but her charitable interests made her perfect for a vicar's wife. She remained devoted to Kilvert's memory, and never remarried. On her death in 1911, she was buried in Bredwardine churchyard at some distance from her late husband. Separated in life, the couple were not even destined to lie together in death. The plot next to Kilvert, intended for her, was taken by a pair of spinster sisters.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Many readers who are interested by the diary have found themselves drawn to Kilvert himself, to his humour and modesty, and to the frankness with which he writes about his susceptibility to female beauty. There are 44 passages containing descriptions of women and girls. These are sometimes emotionally overcharged and, just occasionally, give the modern reader uncomfortable pause - for example, the state of near-ecstasy in which Kilvert writes of receiving the caresses of the seven-year-old Carrie Britton. Hope did preserve three of the notebooks. She presented one to Plomer himself, another to Jeremy Sandford, who had written a radio play about Kilvert, and the final one to Charles Harvey, a Kilvert enthusiast. The survival of these originals today in the National Library of Wales and Durham University Library gives one a taste of the sad, irretrievable loss caused by this wanton destruction. The appeal of several episodes in these manuscripts, absent from the edited diary, suggest furthermore that Plomer's insistence that he had published the best of the diary in his three volumes was much too confident.

Plomer had had the commercial good sense to publish an abridged version of the diary, and the imposition of wartime paper restrictions made it unlikely in any case that the complete text could be published in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Plomer had hopes that one day Kilvert's Diary might appear in its entirety. To his everlasting regret, though, he allowed the typescript of the full diary to go missing. Initially, this was not a matter of great concern. The original notebooks still existed, and a new text might be prepared from them. However, in 1958, Plomer learned from Essex Hope, to whom the originals had passed on the death of Perceval Smith, that she "had done away with most of the Diary". "I did not scold Mrs Hope," Plomer wrote at the time, but he admitted later that he felt like strangling her with his own hands.The notebooks were then returned to Essex Hope. Plomer called to see her some time in 1954 and she told him that she had to go into a home and leave her house. She had therefore cleared out a lot of papers and had destroyed the notebooks as they contained private family matters. He recalled he could have strangled her with his bare hands. But she later produced one of the notebooks and gave it to him. It was the Cornish Holiday.

Robert Francis Kilvert started his famous Diary on 1 January 1870. The first entry in the published version starts on 18 January, so we do not know if he gave a reason for starting to keep a diary on that particular date. Fortunately he does say on 3 November 1874: ‘Why do I keep this voluminous journal? I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me’. Kilvert was probably thinking of family, not that his diary would eventually be read world-wide. The diary runs from January 1870 until just before his death on 23 September 1879. We believe the diary filled about twenty-nine notebooks. Mrs Kilvert removed all the notebooks from 9 September 1875 to 1 March 1876 and 27 June 1876 to 31 December 1877, we believe for personal reasons. She removed all mention of herself. On Mrs Kilvert’s death in 1911 the remaining twenty-two notebooks were passed to Kilvert’s sister Dora Pitcairn who in turn left them to her niece Frances Essex Hope, n ée Smith.

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Kilvert's hopes that his personal record might be made public may have been distant - he was disappointed in his lifetime by his failure to publish his somewhat conventional poetry - but he harboured them all the same. He showed passages from the diary to his Oxford friend Anthony Lawson Mayhew, and perhaps, additionally, to his future wife, Elizabeth Rowland, and observed that the diary might interest and amuse "some who come after me". She later gave one notebook to Jeremy Sandford, the playwright, because he had written a piece about Kilvert for the radio which she liked. That was the notebook for April to June 1870. The third notebook was given to a Mr Harvey from Birmingham who had corresponded with her for some time. These three notebooks are the only remaining originals of Kilvert’s Diary.