Books with author W.H. Hudson

"You are a traveller in little things--in something very small--which takes you into the villages and hamlets, where you meet and converse with small farmers, innkeepers, labourers and their wives, with other persons who live on the land. In this way you get to hear a good deal about rent and cost of living, and what the people are able and not able to do." Thus was described William Henry Hudson, who was delighted with this portrayal. Hudson was a writer, naturalist, and trained ornithologist from Argentina, a son of Anglo-American parents who wrote exclusively in English. While many of his books dealt with South American life--including Green Mansions, The Purple Land, and the autobiographical Far Away and Long Ago--he also focused on Britain, to which he emigrated in 1874. A Traveller in Little Things is one such title, a collection of essays and sketches, many of which were originally printed in The New Statesman, The Saturday Review, The Nation, and The Cornhill Magazine. Throughout, Hudson's keen observations, lively writing, and charming anecdotes make this a delightful collection of "little things" from one of the most unique writers of his generation.

“Long Ago and Far Away” is the autobiography of naturalist William Hudson, who spent the first eighteen years of his life on the Argentinean pampas. Hudson is revered in Argentina, where they refer to him as Guillermo Enrique Hudson and name streets and towns after him. In simple and stately prose, he writes about his boyhood as one of several sons in an English family that ran an estancia on the Pampas. Despite several failed attempts to school him, he managed to pick up one of the best educations available: by using his eyes and ears to study nature. His skill in language, which is considerable, came from reading his father's books on his own. Whether writing about ombu trees, plovers, snakes, lightning storms, rheas (Argentinian ostriches), or his neighboring ranchers, Hudson brought a whole world to life with this book. Hudson published “Long Ago and Far Away” in 1917 while he was living in England. During W. H. Hudson’s time, the Argentine pampas was a land of freedom and excitement, which he describes well in this memoir. Descriptions of natural history and wildlife also abound, together with politics and interpersonal relationships of the times. You'd think Hudson’s book would give insights into Hudson's childhood and life - and it does - but more importantly it recreates the history, culture and geography of Argentina in a way few travel books accomplish. “Long Ago and Far Away” is perhaps one of the greatest autobiographies ever written, a book that will, without question, withstand several readings.

On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons, when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and so vividly that it is almost an illusion. That is an intensely emotional condition and vanishes as quickly as it comes. This was different. To return to the simile and metaphor used at the beginning, it was as if the cloud shadows and haze had passed away and the entire wide prospect beneath me made clearly visible.

This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare s finesse to Oscar Wilde s wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim s Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library.

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Excerpt: ...and more powerful song than the English bird. On the other side of the hedge was the potrero, or paddock, where a milch-cow with two or three horses were kept. The manservant, whose name was Nepomucino, presided over orchard and paddock, also to some extent over the entire establishment. Nepomucino was a pure negro, a little old round-headed, blear-eyed man, about five feet four in height, the short lumpy wool on his head quite grey; slow in speech and movements, his old black or chocolate-coloured fingers all crooked, stiff-jointed, and pointing spontaneously in different directions. I have never seen anything in the human subject to equal the dignity of Nepomucino, the profound gravity of his bearing and expression forcibly reminding one of an owl. Apparently he had come to look upon himself as the sole head and master of the establishment, and the sense of responsibility had more than steadied him. The negrine propensity to frequent explosions of inconsequent laughter was not, of course, to be expected in such a sober-minded person; but he was, I think, a little too sedate for a black, for, although his face would shine on warm days like polished ebony, it did not smile. Everyone in the house conspired to keep up the fiction of Nepomucino's importance; they had, in fact, conspired so long and so well, that it had very nearly ceased to be a fiction. Everybody addressed him with grave respect. Not a syllable of his long name was ever omitted-what the consequences of calling him Nepo, or Cino, or Cinito, the affectionate diminutive, would have been I am unable to say, since I never had the courage to try the experiment. It often amused me to hear Dona Mercedes calling to him from the house, and throwing the whole emphasis on the last syllable in a long, piercing crescendo: "Ne-po-mu-ci-no-o." Sometimes, when I sat in the orchard, he would come, and, placing himself before me, discourse gravely about things in general, clipping his words...

W.H. Hudson, in full William Henry Hudson (born August 4, 1841, near Buenos Aires, Argentina—died August 18, 1922, London, England), British author, naturalist, and ornithologist, best known for his exotic romances, especially Green Mansions. Hudson’s parents were originally New Englanders who took up sheep farming in Argentina. He spent his childhood—lovingly recalled in Far Away and Long Ago (1918)—freely roaming the pampas, studying the plant and animal life, and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier. After an illness at 15 permanently affected his health, he became introspective and studious; his reading of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, which confirmed his own observations of nature, had a particularly strong impact. After his parents’ death, he led a wandering life. Little is known of this period or of his early years in England, where he settled in 1869 (and was naturalized in 1900). Poverty and ill-health may have occasioned his marriage in 1876 to a woman much older than himself. He and his wife lived precariously on the proceeds of two boardinghouses, until she inherited a house in the Bayswater section of London, where Hudson spent the rest of his life. His early books, romances with a South American setting, are weak in characterization but imbued with a brooding sense of nature’s power. Although Hudson’s reputation now rests chiefly on these novels, when published they attracted little attention. The first, The Purple Land that England Lost, 2 vol. (1885), was followed by several long short stories, collected in 1902 as El Ombú. His last romance, Green Mansions (1904), is the strange love story of Rima, a mysterious creature of the forest, half bird and half human. Rima, the best known of Hudson’s characters, is the subject of the statue by Jacob Epstein in the bird sanctuary erected in Hudson’s memory in Hyde Park, London, in 1925. The romances secured Hudson the friendship of many English men of letters, among them Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Edward Garnett, and George Gissing. His books on ornithological studies (Argentine Ornithology, 1888–89; British Birds, 1895; etc.) brought recognition from the statesman Sir Edward Grey, who procured him a state pension in 1901. He finally achieved fame with his books on the English countryside—Afoot in England (1909), A Shepherd’s Life (1910), Dead Man’s Plack (1920), A Traveller in Little Things (1921), and A Hind in Richmond Park (1922). By their detailed, imaginative descriptions, conveying the sensations of one who accepted nature in all its aspects, these works did much to foster the “back-to-nature” movement of the 1920s and 1930s but were subsequently little read.

excerpt:There are not many crows in London; the number of the birds that are left are indeed few, and, if we exclude the magpie and jay, there are only three species. But the magpie and jay cannot be left out altogether, when we find both species still existing at a distance of six and a half to seven miles from Charing Cross. The magpie is all but lost; at the present time there are no more than four birds inhabiting inner London, doubtless escaped from captivity, and afraid to leave the parks in which they found refuge—those islands of verdure in the midst of a sea, or desert, of houses. One bird, the survivor of a pair, has his home in St. James’s Park, and is the most interesting figure in that haunt- 21 - of birds; a spirited creature, a great hater and persecutor of the carrion crows when they come. The other three consort together in Regent’s Park; once or twice they have built a nest, but failed to hatch their eggs. Probably all three are females. When, some time ago, the ‘Son of the Marshes’ wrote that the magpie had been extirpated in his own county of Surrey, and that to see it he should have to visit the London parks, he made too much of these escaped birds, which may be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Yet we know that the pie was formerly—even in this- 22 - century—quite common in London. Yarrell, in his ‘British Birds,’ relates that he once saw twenty-three together in Kensington Gardens. In these gardens they bred, probably for the last time, in 1856. Nor, so far as I know, do any magpies survive in the woods and thickets on the outskirts of the metropolis, except at two spots in the south-west district. The fate of the last pair at Hampstead has been related by Harting, in Lobley’s ‘Hampstead Hill’ (London, 1889). For several years this pair had their nest in an unclimbable tree at the Grove; at length, one of the pair was shot by a local bird-stuffer, after which the surviving bird twice found and returned with a new mate; but one by one all were killed by the same miscreant.