Far Away and Long Ago: A History of My Early Life
1918
The South American pampas, those endless grasslands stretching to the horizon, forged one of English literature's most delicate prose stylists. W.H. Hudson spent his childhood in Argentina's vast interior, and when he came to write about it decades later in England, those early impressions remained startlingly vivid. Nothing is ever blotted out, he suggests. Not the ombu trees around his birthplace, not the ghost of a slave woman that haunted the estate, not his loyal sheepdog Pechicho or the strange figures who drifted through his young life: the Hermit, Captain Scott. The landscape pulses through every page, the birds, the cattle, the horses, the infinite grass, rendered with an observer's rapt attention. Hudson left Argentina as a young man and never returned, and this memoir reads as an elegy for a homeland that existed only in memory. It is not a conventional autobiography but a collection of luminous fragments, as if the author were sifting through the sediment of childhood and finding it all still gleaming there, iridescent and intact.
