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“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.

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.

"The autobiography of the author of 'Green Mansions,' 'The Purple Land' and 'Adventures Among Birds' is all that one could ask it to be. For this writer's childhood and youth were spent on the pampas of South America, so colorfully painted in his later essays and stories. He writes of the varied aspects of the plain; of the romantic and picturesque figures, landowners and cattle breeders, who were neighbors; of the first visit to Buenos Ayres; of the springtime that comes in August; and, above all, of his childish love for birds. The biography carries him through first youth to the edge of manhood, but it is particularly rich in its recollection of early childhood, from the fifth to the seventh years." -Book Review Digest "Mr. Hudson's account of his early years is in many ways like a mixture of a Conrad novel and Robinson Crusoe. His small boy's eyes were the eyes of an explorer. Most books of reminiscences are for old people. This book of Mr. Hudson's is equally for the young." -Anthaneum "Seldom are youthful reminiscences recounted with greater dignity, beauty and vividness. The adventures of the spirit, too, are no less vivid than the daily life with his brothers, and the sympathy between mother and son is tenderly portrayed." -The Nation "A biography which can scarcely fail to become a classic of self-revelation. The tale is told with the art which is so much instinct that it appears mere effortless ease." -Margaret Ashmun in The Bookman "In 'Far Away and Long Ago' he has written a book that takes it place at once among the classics of autobiography." -Edwin Francis Edgett in the Boston Transcript "The book deserves a place on any shelf of biography alongside 'The Story of My Heart' by the English naturalist, Richard Jefferies." -Outlook "Mr. Hudson's method of describing his loved birds is singularly like that of Fabre with his insects. The same friendly simplicity is seen in both; Mr. Hudson, like Fabre, seems to take the reader by the hand and lead him into the midst of his discoveries." -Marguerite Fellows in the Publishers Weekly "One is reluctant to apply to Mr. Hudson's book those terms of praise which are bestowed upon literary and artistic merit, though needless to say it possesses both. One does not want to recommend it as a book so much as to greet it as a person, and not the clipped and imperfect person of ordinary autobiography, but the whole and complete person whom we meet rarely enough in life or in literature." -London Times Literary Supplement "Anybody who is not already in the middle of a book ought to lose no time in beginning on W. H. Hudson's 'Far Away and Long Ago.' Anybody who is in the middle of a book ought to let it wait until he too has read this most enticing autobiography about childhood, Argentine, ostriches, and South American cowboys." -Heywood Broun

CHAPTER I EARLIEST MEMORIES Preamble-The house where I was born-The singular Ombu tree-A tree without a name-The plain-The ghost of a murdered slave-Our playmate, the old sheep-dog-A first riding-lesson-The cattle: an evening scene-My mother-Captain Scott-The hermit and his awful penance. It was never my intention to write an autobiography. Since I took to writing in my middle years I have, from time to time, related some incident of my boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in The Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures among Birds, and other works, also in two or three magazine articles: all this material would have been kept back if I had contemplated such a book as this. When my friends have asked me in recent years why I did not write a history of my early life on the pampas, my answer was that I had already told all that was worth telling in these books. And I really believed it was so; for when a person endeavours to recall his early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there, some feature in the landscape-hill or wood or tower or spire-touched and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence or regular progression-nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide shrouded mental landscape. It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus distinctly remembered and visualized are precisely those which were most important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory while all the rest has been permanently blotted out.

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