W.H. Hudson : A Biography

Faber and Faber Limited, London, first edition, 1982. Cloth, 8vo, 23 cm,. 314 pp, [8] pp of plates, ills, facs. From the blurb - "William Henry Hudson (1841- 1922) lived two lives, literally worlds apart: as a young adventurer in South America, and later as an English field naturalist, a wandering Gilbert White. Bom in wild surroundings on the pampas, he grew up among shepherds, gaucho herdsmen and vast flocks of wild birds. His boyhood was spent watching birds and snakes, and as a young man he travelled widely on horseback, visiting Brazil, Uruguay and Patagonia, making collections of birdskins and writing brilliant accounts of bird life which won the admiration of leading naturalists of the day, Darwin among them. Two South American bird species bear his name. Yet, when he came to England in 1874, aged 32, he could find no place in the world of professional natural history. For 18 years he lived in London in great poverty, until a book on the wild life of La Plata made his name. Thereafter he was acclaimed as the finest nature writer of his time. After his death his name enjoyed a brief notoriety when Epstein's memorial to him was unveiled in Hyde Park. Because of its central figure, based on Rima, the heroine of Green Mansions, it was violently denounced as obscene. Hudson left nearly all he had to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which he helped to found, and whose success and influence today owe much to his early support. For 50 years after his death his books were largely forgotten, except by a few devoted readers in Britain and America, and also in Japan, where they have become compulsory school reading. But in recent years his achievement as the chronicler of life on the pampas and in rural England in pre-motoring days has begun to win new recognition. His birthplace in Buenos Aires is now a museum in the Hudson Park for Ecology and Culture. New editions of his country books have appeared. Episodes from his Wiltshire masterpiece, A Shepherd's Life, based on stories he heard from old villagers about the 1830 rising of farm workers, were the source for a television serial, 'Bread Or Blood'. Non-authorial inscription on flyleaf, front endpapers foxed, top edge dust-stained, otherwise Good in used dustwrapper.