Audiobook · read by volunteers
Far Away and Long Ago
William Henry Hudson (1841–1922)
Read by hefyd, Jenilee, Steven Rushing, Lizzie Driver, J. M. Smallheer, Marian Brown, stepheather, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Christine Blachford, Gary Gilberd · 24 chapters · 9 h 34
About the book
William Henry Hudson was born to American parents on the pampas of Argentina, and in this memoir of his youth he gives a vivid account of the world that shaped him. He describes his earliest memories, the family home and its surroundings, the death of an old dog, the plantation and the broad, open plain with its birds, animals, plants and people. Hudson was a naturalist, and his eye for the life of the countryside is sharp and loving. Twenty-four chapters and nearly ten hours, read by LibriVox volunteers, make a gentle, absorbing portrait of a vanished landscape and of a boy learning to look at the world around him. A lyrical, observant and unhurried book that appeals to lovers of nature and to anyone who enjoys the memoir as a literary form.
Introduction
William Henry Hudson (1841 to 1922) was an author, naturalist and ornithologist. He was born in the Quilmes district of Buenos Aires province, in Argentina, to parents from the United States, and he spent his youth studying the plants and animals of the plains and observing the people who lived there. Later he settled in England, where he wrote about birds and country life, and also produced novels such as Green Mansions.
Far Away and Long Ago, published in 1918 when he was in his seventies, is his account of those early years. It is not a conventional autobiography. Hudson is less interested in the events of his life than in the sights, sounds and sensations that remain in his memory: the feel of the grass, the cry of a bird, the character of a neighbor. His prose is calm and exact, and he has a remarkable gift for conveying how the world felt to a child.
The book can be read as a record of a way of life that has largely disappeared, with the gauchos, the estancias and the wide horizons of a country still in the making. It is also a quiet meditation on memory and on the pleasures of attention.
The recording has twenty-four chapters and lasts nearly ten hours. It is read by volunteers of LibriVox. If you like nature writing, memoirs of childhood or journeys to far-off places, this is a very fine choice. Hudson's love of birds, which later made him an important voice in the early conservation movement in England, is already clear in these pages. His memories of the pampas are filled with detail, and his style is unforced and natural. It is a quiet classic.
Public domain
William Henry Hudson died in 1922: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text