The Purple Land

The Purple Land tells the story of Richard Lamb, an idealistic young Englishman, who spirits his new wife, Paquita, to Montevideo to escape the vengeance of her Argentine father. Here, he is catapulted into a series of picaresque adventures: horse-stealing, duelling, imprisonment and fighting on the losing side of a civil war, all the while falling serially and unsuitably in love. Rooted in Hudson's evocation of the simplicity and dignity of life on the pampas and his masterful depiction of its wildlife and landscape, The Purple Land is the first modern 'road novel'. It is also a narrative of transformation, the Creolisation of an Englishman, redeemed by the heightened exuberance, energy and warmth of South America.

William Henry Hudson was born to parents of English and Irish origins in Argentina in 1841. The vast open spaces of the pampas nurtured an early love of the natural world, and he became well known as a naturalist and ornithologist. His best-known work, Far Away and Long Ago (1918), tells the story of his formative, early life in Argentina. The Purple Land (1885), infused with the lawless daring and braggadocio which he had seen around him from his earliest years, was his first published book. Hudson moved to England in 1874 and married two years later. A founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, he died in London in 1922, having written a number of sublime books about the English countryside, including Hampshire Days (1903) and A Shepherd's Life (1910).