W.H. Hudson

W.H. Hudson was one of the strangest and most beautiful writers in the English language — an Argentine gaucho’s son who came to England at the age of thirty-three, lived in poverty for decades, and produced a body of work about birds, landscapes, and the natural world that Joseph Conrad called “a revelation of the gorgeous magnificence and beauty of the visible world” and that Ford Madox Ford described as the finest nature writing in English. His romance Green Mansions (1904), the story of a man who falls in love with a bird-girl named Rima in the Venezuelan forest, was his most popular book and became an unlikely bestseller, but his finest achievements were his autobiography Far Away and Long Ago (1918) and his studies of English rural life, particularly A Shepherd’s Life (1910), works of such quiet, exact observation and such unforced beauty that they have never been surpassed in their kind.

The Pampas

William Henry Hudson was born in 1841 at Quilmes, near Buenos Aires, the son of American parents who had emigrated to Argentina to farm. He grew up on the pampas — the vast grasslands of the Argentine interior — and his childhood was spent in intimate contact with the natural world: birds, animals, gauchos, and the immense open landscape that shaped his imagination permanently. He was largely self-educated, learning natural history from observation rather than books, and from an early age he was a passionate ornithologist, studying and collecting birds with an exactitude that later won him recognition from professional scientists.

His autobiography, Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life (1918), is one of the most beautiful memoirs in the English language — a recreation of childhood on the pampas that is simultaneously a precise natural history and a lyric evocation of a lost world. The book captures the Argentine landscape — its birds, its light, its vastness, its human inhabitants — with a sensory vividness that has few equals.

England and Poverty

Hudson came to England in 1874 and never returned to Argentina. For the next twenty years he lived in severe poverty, supported by a small Civil List pension and occasional journalism. He married Emily Wingrave in 1876; the marriage was apparently loveless but endured. He lived in London boarding houses, then in a cottage in Worthing, writing steadily and publishing books that were admired by a small circle of writers and naturalists but ignored by the general public.

The Purple Land (1885), his first novel, was a picaresque romance set in Uruguay that Robert Louis Stevenson praised. A Crystal Age (1887) was a utopian romance. The Naturalist in La Plata (1892) and Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) drew on his Argentine experience. Birds in a Village (1893) and Nature in Downland (1900) recorded his observations of English wildlife with the same precision he had brought to the birds of the pampas.

Green Mansions

Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904) was Hudson’s most popular work — the story of Abel, a political exile who penetrates the Venezuelan jungle and discovers Rima, a mysterious girl who lives among the birds and speaks a language that is itself like birdsong. The novel was a fantasy, but Hudson’s knowledge of tropical natural history gave it a vividness and specificity that set it apart from the run of literary romances. It was not a success on publication, but after Edward Garnett championed it and it was reissued by Duckworth, it became a bestseller and made Hudson famous at last. Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of Rima in the Kensington Gardens bird sanctuary (1925) is the most visible memorial to Hudson in London.

The English Books

Hudson’s finest works were his studies of the English countryside. A Shepherd’s Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs (1910) was a masterpiece of rural writing — an account of the shepherds, farmers, and villagers of the Wiltshire downs that captured a way of life that was already vanishing. Afoot in England (1909) and Hampshire Days (1903) recorded his walks through the English countryside with an observer’s eye for birds, plants, weather, and human character.

Collecting Hudson

Green Mansions (Duckworth, 1904) in first edition is the primary target and a scarce book. The Purple Land (Sampson Low, 1885, 2 volumes) is the rare first novel. Far Away and Long Ago (Dent, 1918) is the finest single volume. A Shepherd’s Life (Methuen, 1910) is the rural classic. The collected works (Dent, 1922–1923, 24 volumes) is the definitive edition. Hudson’s manuscripts and correspondence are held at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, of which he was an early supporter.