Hudson, W H
Entry updated 10 August 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1841-1922) Argentinian-born naturalist and author, in England from 1874, a UK citizen from 1900; active from about 1870. His early maturity was spent as an "amateur" though highly competent naturalist in the pampas, specifically the Banda Orientál region in Argentina and Uruguay, where his first novel, The Purple Land That England Lost (1885 2vols; rev vt The Purple Land 1904) [for subtitles see Checklist below], is set; it recounts an hegira through this land with Fantastic Voyage elements, told in a sometimes exalted Magic Realist style with inserted legends and tales.
The Banda Orientál seems also to have shaped Hudson's intense quasi-Utopian novel of the Far Future, A Crystal Age (1887 anon; signed, with a new preface, 1906) [for more details see Checklist below]. On a "botanizing excursion" in this landscape, which is never named, young Smith has a terrible fall, awakening from consequential Suspended Animation many years hence (perhaps 10,000) to find himself a Sleeper Awake immersed in a reposeful Ecologically-balanced Pastoral world, dense with wild animals (who avoid him); a small population of humans lives at peace in self-contained central Houses, the low-slung architecture and decor of which are intricately described in language influenced by John Ruskin (1819-1900), the Pre-Raphaelite Movement in general, and William Morris's Arts-and-Craft ethos in particular. Each House – there are many over a vast expanse – is governed by a Father and Mother with the help of strictly enforced codes of behaviour (see Crime and Punishment): this partnership with the natural world has been gladly and harmoniously adhered to for millennia. Technology is eschewed. Meat has never been eaten (hence animals' instinctive distrust of Smith). To tell a lie – see the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) – is an almost inconceivable abomination. It is therefore an achievement for the crystalline souls of the dwellers in this world to credit traditional narratives depicting the apocalyptic end of an evil world aeons ago.
The world that evolved from that nightmare, though its benefits seem utopian, is not in fact premised on any utopian thesis: in The Crystal Age it is merely and transparently the way things are. Hudson, true to his nineteenth-century reluctance to discuss Sex in public, sadly scumbles a central explanatory circumstance: threats of male rivalries and competitive Overpopulation are in fact (but unclearly) explained through the fact that only a destined Father and Mother in each House reach sexual maturity, thus restricting the number of children in each generation. Smith, who is only 21 and aggressively masculine, cannot grasp why his insistent Yahoo-ish expressions of love for Yoletta, a daughter of the House, does not lead to what he is trying to awaken: the "maidenly shame" of physical passion on her part. In the end, he learns too late that he and Yoletta were in fact being prepared to become the next parents of the House: having taken Poison in despair, he slips deathwards as Yoletta runs to him with the good news (see Suicide). A Crystal Age ends in "everlasting silence."
A similar quasi-supernatural harmony, in this case with the Amazonian forest, is enjoyed by the wild girl Rima in the affectingly powerful Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904), filmed as Green Mansions (1959); the last of her race, with supernatural talents (she can catch arrows in flight), she is ultimately destroyed by the local Indians, who are no more in tune with Nature than is the unhappy civilized protagonist. Both stories are remarkable anticipations of modern ecological mysticism (see again Ecology). At high points, in both novels, Hudson's descriptions of the natural world, and of edifices in harmony with that world, reach a level of ekphrasis (the literary device where words are used to depict panoramas of art, or nature) of epiphanic intensity.
"Marta Riquelme", in El Ombú (coll 1902; exp vt Tales of the Pampas 1916), is an equally feverish fantasy in which the eponymous woman undergoes sorrow-induced metamorphosis into a bird. A Little Boy Lost (1905) is a children's fantasy which further develops Hudson's peculiar fascination (just before his death, he claimed his wife was a centenarian) with maternal figures; the boy himself, however, leaves behind him both his mother and the "lady of the hills" whose love does not keep him from his quest for Transcendence in the sea. [JC/BS]
see also: Anonymous SF Authors; History of SF; Sleeper Awakes.
William Henry Hudson
born Los Veinticinco Ombúes, Quilmes, Argentina: 4 August 1841
died London: 18 August 1922
works (selected)
- The Purple Land That England Lost: Travels and Adventures in the Banda Oriental, South America (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885) [published in two volumes: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Purple Land: Being the Narrative of one Richard Lamb's Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as told by Himself (London: Duckworth and Company, 1904) [rev vt of the above, with cuts: new introduction: hb/nonpictorial]
- A Crystal Age (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1887), anonymous [hb/nonpictorial]
- A Crystal Age (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1906) as W H Hudson [rev of above: hb/nonpictorial]
- Playthings of Desire: Strange New Pleasures in a Strange New World (Toronto, Ontario: Fireside Publications Limited, circa 1945-1950) [chap: cut recast vt of the above: pb/uncredited]
- A Crystal Age (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1906) as W H Hudson [rev of above: hb/nonpictorial]
- El Ombú (London: Duckworth and Co, 1902) [coll: pb/uncredited]
- Tales of the Pampas (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1916) [exp vt of the above: hb/]
- Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (London: Duckworth and Co, 1904) [hb/nonpictorial]
- A Little Boy Lost (London: Duckworth and Co, 1905) [illus/hb/A D McCormick]
links
previous versions of this entry