The Purple Land
An Englishman travels through Uruguay in the 1870s, falls in love with the wrong woman, and gets involved in a revolution. Hudson was born on the pampas and knew the country intimately, and the novel has the texture of firsthand knowledge rather than research.
It is episodic and often politically incorrect, and its portrait of rural South America is unsentimental. What makes it worth reading is the landscape writing and the sense of a society with different rules about violence, property and honour. Hudson's later memoirs are gentler; this one has mud and knives in it.
Public-domain status
First published in 1885. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; W. H. Hudson died in 1922, so this work has been free to republish there since 1993.
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