regshoe | Entries tagged with author: w. h. hudson

Re-read The Yellow Poppy by D. K. Broster (1920)—thanks very much to

osprey_archer for sending me a lovely copy of this! Judged by the author to be the best of her own books, and I can see why—there really is a lot going on in it, and re-reading was an opportunity to admire all the moving parts of the plot and the complexities of the characters. I like Valentine more than ever, and I really appreciated the ending properly this time. Broster knows how to construct a tragedy.

The Story of a Lie by Robert Louis Stevenson (1879). Reading RLS's books in a more or less random order, I happened upon this one at the library and decided to read it next. It's a novella and fairly simple in concept: the main character is a young man who travels in Paris and makes the acquaintance of a morally dubious rogue who makes a living by cheating people; he then returns to England and falls in love with a woman who—in an excellent example of literary coincidence—turns out to be the rogue's daughter, who hardly knows the father who's been living abroad for years and is eager for news of him. Of course her new boyfriend lies about the uprightness of her father's character, he then also returns to England and the truth is revealed, and complications follow. The story brings up interesting questions but doesn't resolve them especially interestingly; the ending is far too pat and conventional, and the actual love story is very bland. (I have come to the conclusion that RLS could only write romance when he either wasn't trying to or wasn't allowed to admit it, depending on how deliberately you think Kidnapped is like that.) The edition I read also included the short story The Body Snatcher, which is set among the medical students of nineteenth-century Edinburgh, is about exactly what it sounds like and is very enjoyably gruesome and horrible.

Birds in Town and Village by W. H. Hudson (1919). This is a slightly miscellaneous collection: it includes two longer pieces on the very different bird communities of two villages, one in the Thames Valley and one in Cornwall, which Hudson visited at different times, together with some various shorter essays. Hudson writes about birds very well, and the descriptions of both the rich heathland and orchard songbird communities of the one and the windswept wintry rooks and starlings of the other are all lovely. ♥ The opinions expressed, there and in the essays, are really fascinatingly inconsistent from a modern perspective. Hudson gets some things exactly right, such as lamenting the decline and probable future local extinction of birds such as the wryneck that really are now virtually absent from Britain, or speaking out against forms of bird persecution then common and now generally condemned; and then there he is arguing for the deliberate introduction of exotic species to make up the deficiencies which those persecutions have caused in British bird life! A great window into the history of ornithology and wildlife conservation.

Daughter of the Dales by Hannah Hauxwell with Barry Cockcroft (1990). Hannah Hauxwell was a farmer in a remote part of the North Pennines. She was the last surviving member of her farming family and never married, so she lived and worked alone for many years in considerable hardship and poverty, until she appeared in a television documentary which suddenly captured the hearts of the nation as these things sometimes do and catapulted her to fame. This is the second of the books which she and Cockcroft—the maker of the documentary—wrote about her life. Its rather random variousness has something of the savour of cashing in on the unexpected phenomenon, but is also really interesting and kind of charming. Hauxwell had by this time retired from farming and writes about leaving her old home and establishing herself in a cottage in a nearby village, while still dealing with her newfound fame; alongside this she reminisces about life in the dale earlier in the century (the arrival of the wireless, the place of the Methodist chapel in local life, etc.), some of her friends and neighbours contribute material on other aspects of Baldersdale's history (what it was like to go into service on a farm, the impingements of the aristocracy on the lives of local people, etc.), and we hear about future plans for Hauxwell's house and farm (her un-'improved' old-fashioned farming methods preserved a very ecologically rich and valuable meadow habitat; some of her land was bought by the Durham Wildlife Trust and is still managed as a nature reserve).

Harvest Season by Annick Trent (2023). A short addition to the Old Bridge Inn books, which is available to download for free! Aww, I really enjoyed this one. In its story about a Welsh woman who travels into England for seasonal work in harvest season, the Gloucestershire barmaid with whom she had a brief affair the previous year, their reignited and developing love story and the political tangle they get involved in when the magistrate turns up and tries to arrest the local trade union organisers, it has all the merits that one could wish for from what it is—everything I like about the Old Bridge Inn books is here in miniature. Highly recommended :D

The Diaries of Anne Lister, volume 1, edited by Helena Whitbread (written 1816-24, published 1988). I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and decided now was the time to get round to it. It is absolutely fascinating! Anne Lister writes about all sorts of things in her journal, and it's full of terribly interesting and useful historical detail on e.g. the practicalities of travel, details of food, the unstable political situation of the period, the social life of early-nineteenth-century Halifax and York, etc. etc. A lot of the detail she includes is not the sort of thing that often made it into fiction at this time, so that even the non-coded sections of the journal feel very immediate and down-to-earth in a way period writing written for publication doesn't tend to. And then there are the coded sections, of course! Really, really fascinating stuff—both the personal details of the relationships described and the generalities of how Lister managed to live in the world as a lesbian in a way that made sense to her and which she made legible to the women she was interested in, and also her thoughts on the subject as a whole. I was surprised in a few places by how 'modern' some of her ideas and reasoning seemed, and yet they are very much of their time, and the journal really is an invaluable source on how people in the past thought and talked about these things even when they didn't normally write about them. Sometimes Lister is annoyingly vague about exactly what happened or what was said, at other times she's startlingly detailed. Occasionally the editing annoyed me—it's not really clear just how much selecting and cutting Whitbread has done, but it's obviously quite a lot, and at times she steps in to summarise things that I'd quite like to have read in detail in the original—but mostly I'm just impressed by her achievement. On the other hand, reading this has confirmed me in my opinion that Anne Lister was really not a very admirable person, either generally or in how she conducted her relationships—the volume opens with her seducing her girlfriend's sister while they're both accompanying the girlfriend on her honeymoon, which is more or less representative; she's frequently dishonest and duplicitous, a pretty massive snob and, despite her own socially unconventional life, extremely conservative politically (I think her particular outlook/set of ideas is a very interesting one, but it's not a good one). Nevertheless I enjoyed reading about her life, her thoughts on it and her emotional experiences, aside from the historical aspects of the journal. I look forward to the second volume!

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers (1951). Another one I'd had on the to-read list for ages, and finally managed to find at the library recently. The Ballad of the Sad Café is a strange little novella about an eccentric, reclusive woman who opens a 'café' (it seemed more like a pub to me, with the evening opening hours and the alcohol—are American bars not normally like that?—but never mind) in her tiny Southern US town with the help of the hunchbacked cousin who turns up mysteriously one day, and how ruin and tragedy eventually overtake them. The whole story is written in a fairytale-ish style, and told with very much a fairytale logic, and I loved it—McCullers makes that fairytale logic make perfect sense in a fairly modern American setting, and does so with a constant compelling strangeness which is really rather beautiful despite the equally strange tragedy of the story itself. And Miss Amelia herself is a highly memorable character who I liked a lot. Collected together with it are various shorter stories, which I didn't like so much—they're very good, but tend to focus on unpleasant and depressing aspects of life in a style that reminded me of some of the other mid-twentieth-century American stuff I've read and generally react to by just thinking I'm not interested in reading stories like that, and they're not at all in the same style or mood as the title story.

Far Away and Long Ago: A History of my Early Life by W. H. Hudson (1918). Something a bit different! I'd previously enjoyed some of Hudson's nature writing about the wildlife and countryside of England, where he lived in later life; this is his account of his childhood on the pampas of Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century, and the various human and animal sights and dramas surrounding him. He spends a lot of time describing the wildlife of the pampas, especially the birds, and I enjoyed these sections the best—Hudson has such a talent for vivid, imaginative description of the natural world and for finding the significance and beauty in descriptions of wildlife. But the historical stuff was also interesting—he describes the general state of life and society in nineteenth-century Argentina, both the remote countryside of his home and Buenos Aires as experienced on visits, and how some major historical events like the ongoing civil wars and the overthrow of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852 appeared to him as they happened. I knew nothing about any of this, and it was interesting to read about a new historical setting, brutal as some of the details were. I could have done without the racism, and the book is rather amusingly poorly paced (at one point Hudson says, whoops, I should have included this in an earlier chapter but I forgot, it'll have to go here instead; apparently editing just wasn't an option for him?), but on the whole a very enjoyable read.

First, a couple of D. K. Broster fandom things, thanks to

theseatheseatheopensea: Flight of the Heron is now available as a pdf on archive.org; and here is another photograph of Broster herself, in academic dress and accompanied by a little magazine bio that must have been written while she was working on FotH!

According to Gibson by Denis Mackail (1923). A loose series of comic stories which Mackail narrates in character as himself, recording the absurd but entertaining tall tales told to him by Gibson, a mysterious eccentric from his club. The stories themselves feature ghosts, improbable scientific developments, political intrigue and various involved and contradictory backstories for Gibson himself, about whom Mackail's fictional persona eventually discovers a little more of the truth... The stories were good fun—the style and sense of humour are very much reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse—but nowhere near as good as Greenery Street, which was a bit of a disappointment.

Afoot in England by W. H. Hudson (1909). More lovely nature/travel writing—this one is about Hudson's various adventures travelling around England (by which he, as so often in literature, means the south of England) on foot and by bicycle, staying in remote villages and famous cities, observing both the natural world and the people he meets and writing about it all in beautiful detail. There are various interesting local places, the Roman ruins at Silchester (I recognised the name Calleva from Rosemary Sutcliff!), watching the midsummer sunrise at Stonehenge, more on the avian residents of Salisbury Cathedral and lots more, all illustrated with some absolutely gorgeous descriptive writing and enlivened by Hudson's sometimes slightly odd but usually interesting opinions. (I've just learnt from his Wikipedia page that he was a supporter of Lamarckian evolution—still within the bounds of scientific respectability at this time, but it's still somehow funny to think of it overlapping with the beginnings of the modern conservation movement).

Regiment of Women by Clemence Dane (1917). Well, this is something of a book! It's set at a girls' school and deals with the relationship between two teachers: Clare Hartill, the de facto head of the school who rules with a sort of domineering manipulativeness and is widely adored by the girls, and Alwynne Durand, a new and very young mistress who quickly becomes a favourite with the girls and best friends with Clare. (I shipped it from the omelette onwards, of course). Also important is the relationship between Clare and one of her protégés, the thirteen-year-old and academically brilliant Louise Denny, whom we see struggling with the standard of work in the higher form into which Clare has promoted her alongside a difficult and unhappy home life. It all ends badly. That Clare and Alwynne's relationship is a lesbian one is never stated in so many words, but is almost kind of taken for granted by the book—others characters talk about how Alwynne is acting as though she was in love, how obviously Clare is incompatible with the idea of marriage for Alwynne, and so on. Apparently this book inspired The Well of Loneliness, and I can definitely see the resemblance, in the ideas about what lesbians are and how relationships between women work, and in the shape of the ending. This book has a really, really bad ending. ( A rant about the really, really bad ending ) It was still worth reading! Interesting historically as well as in the intrigue at the school—there are some great moments of characters trying to manipulate each other at cross purposes and totally misunderstanding each other's intentions, very darkly funny. Also, poor Louise. :(

First of all—since I believe there are a few people reading my journal who are mostly on Discord and/or Tumblr—if anyone would like to try out Dreamwidth/get to know the site better,

starterpack has just got going and looks like being an excellent resource!

I've spent the last few days going, OK, I need to read a short book next to make sure I can fit it in before the end of the year, and have managed to do this three times before actually running out of year, so that worked. :D Here they are...

Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson (1901). I wanted some nice light non-fiction to complement my Yuletide reading, so went browsing the 'Birds' category on Gutenberg.org, as you do. I'm very happy to have found this! It's beautiful nature writing—both in Hudson's eye for detail and for imaginative and well-observed description, and in his ideas and arguments. The book is structured as a series of essays covering such topics as the beauty of the wood-warbler, the nesting habits of jackdaws, the tragic decline of the raven in lowland England, the folklore surrounding owls and, especially interestingly, Hudson's views on contemporary conservation questions, particularly hunting and egg-collecting. Hudson lived in England in later life and wrote this book there, but he grew up in Argentina, and his descriptions of the countryside and birds of the West Country are interspersed with anecdotes and wildlife from the South American pampas, which I really enjoyed (the upland goose sounds like a lovely bird). The angles taken on everything are always original and interesting, and the whole thing is a delight to read.

White Cockades: An Incident of the Forty-Five by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1887). A Jacobite adventure from the author of Imre: A Memorandum, oh yes :D This book is set in the summer of 1746, when our plucky young hero Andrew Boyd, the son of a Highland landowner, stumbles across a Jacobite fugitive hiding amongst the heather. Andrew and his father take in the man, who introduces himself as Lord Geoffry Armitage, and Andrew more or less textually falls in love with him. Then the Hanoverian soldiers arrive... It's all a very gripping adventure—a much less ambitious book than Flight of the Heron, of course, not so historically detailed and IMO much less geographically convincing. It's also sentimental and a bit overly sensational (I guessed the big plot twist in the first chapter)—but nonetheless a very fun read for all that. I liked the relationship between Andrew and Geoffry, all the more for knowing the author probably did mean it like that, and I enjoyed the drama of the soldiers—I thought Captain Jermain was a good portrayal of how much damage the carelessly powerful can cause without necessarily being malicious. (Keith Windham wouldn't like him at all!). And, you know—I'd have to check the dates, but I don't think it would be terribly difficult to cross it over with Flight of the Heron...

The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (1910). This is a boarding school story, which I always like, and it's a turn-of-the-century Australian novel that isn't by E. W. Hornung, which made for an interesting comparison!—this is a side of Australian life Hornung presumably didn't see much of. The story opens with twelve-year-old Laura Rambotham being sent off to school in Melbourne, and follows her subsequent adventures and misadventures there. My overall feeling is that it's a good book but not necessarily a very enjoyable one. For one thing it's a painfully accurate depiction of the experience of being twelve years old, not knowing how to say or do the right thing and suffering terrible embarrassment as a result. Laura is a very interesting character, deeply flawed and painfully sympathetic, but the other characters all seemed more or less unlikeable, and there's very little warmth to the book's relationships. It is pretty subtextually queer, which was interesting—Laura is continually uninterested in boys, and repeatedly clashes against social expectations about it in ways that again were both very true to life and kind of excruciating to read. At one point she falls in love with an older girl in that sort of desperate, jealous way of a crush when you're an insecure teenager with no way of understanding your own feelings. The ending seemed to be trying to introduce more hope, but did very little to justify it, and felt oddly incomplete as a result—I felt there was a whole extra novel in those hints about Laura's future in the last chapter.