Other:
Green Mansions
A Shepherd's Life

A great part of Hudson's originality can be traced to his biculturalism. Hudson's South American romances are unique works of fiction, with their exotic subject matter and rambling Quixotic narratives written in elegant English prose. Hudson's reputation with the English-language public has declined since Virginia Woolf praised his work in the Common Reader. However, his novel Green Mansions (1904 ), with its romantic story of the pursuit of the bird girl, Rima, has never been out of print . His autobiographical memoir, Far Away and Long Ago (1917), gives an account of his childhood on the pampa. If he had written nothing else, Hudson would be remembered for this poignant memoir which also contains most of the autobiographical material available to the student or researcher. The Hudsons' attempt to settle on the pampa at Quilmes was a slow decline into something near ruin. William's father had to give up sheep farming, sell off his land and open a grocery store. This too failed, and eventually he had to eke a living from growing potatoes. The humiliation of this early family defeat marked Hudson for life, eventually driving him at the age of 32 into a kind of exile in London. Yet, for the child, there were compensations: the family house was full of books and it was possible to get some sort of an education from the travelling schoolteachers who would turn up from time to time and stay for a while. After catching rheumatic fever from a exposure to a hailstorm while out herding cattle, the adolescent Hudson was accorded some of the privileges of the invalid, wandering alone on the plains, observing animals and birds, but also taking careful note of the habits and idiosyncrasies of the human inhabitants. For Hudson, no distinction can be made between the world of humans and the world of animals. All life is endowed with a specific genetic history and adapts to the conditions in which it finds itself. Aware of Darwin's Origin of Species, Hudson believed that nature is not cruel, but merely indifferent to that fate of humans. It was thus in early life that Hudson developed the powers of observation and passion for wildlife that turned him into a naturalist. Before he turned to writing as a full-time profession , he was a professional ornithologist and bird collector, shipping specimens to museums in Britain and the USA. One of his biographers describes him as even looking like a bird, with his eagle's beak of a nose.

In 1874, he departed for England, the land of his grandfather and his American mother's ancestors. When his brother saw him off on his final journey to England he said: “Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.” This statement still stands as a salutory warning to biographers ( see for example W. H. Hudson, Ruth Tomalin, Faber 1982). In London he met and married a decent older woman who owned a bare and gloomy London boarding house. His friend and first biographer, Morley Roberts, called it “a grim jail” which held “a prisoner of genius, whose only true home was under the open sky” (Morley Roberts, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson 1924). It was hardly a love match, and there were rumours of passionate love affairs. However, his wife's income from boarders and the free lodgings she provided enabled Hudson to develop his writing career during the difficult early years. All his work was written in English and first published in Britain between 1885 and 1922. Outwardly, his life during his English exile was uneventful, yet his writings give off a sense of painful regret for a lost Eden. As a writer of sketches and essays on nature themes for the London journals, he liked to explore the countryside of Southern England, staying in country inns or private lodgings from where he wrote letters to his friends. Books like Nature in Downland  (1910) and A Shepherd's Life (1910) caught the nostalgic mood of the Edwardian period, and link him with the gentleman naturalists of the English tradition such as White of Selborne and his Sussex-based contemporary, Richard Jefferies, who died while still young. He was more than a sentimental naturalist, however: he was an accurate and dispassionate observer of the whole dynamic pattern of the English countryside, people, animals, crops, trees and plants. For ornithologists, his Birds of the River Plate is an indispensable reference and valuable collectors' item. Hudson was a pioneer in the field of ecology. He was a dedicated conservationist, and was particularly concerned with the protection of living birds.

For the Argentine reader his work in Spanish translation (he wrote exclusively in English ) has made a unique contribution to criollo literature and has enabled the creation of the national myth of a gaucho nation. His South American romances, and his nature writings – especially A Naturalist in the River Plate (1892) and Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) – are required reading by Argentine school children in Spanish language translation. Despite Hudson's pro-British attitudes, he always saw himself as one of the poor and powerless, representative of a culture that is still politically unformed and vulnerable and of a continent in which democracy and the rule of law are still rare. It was that semi-barbarous life of the plains that Hudson remembered and celebrated in his childhood memoir and masterpiece Far Away and Long Ago. This extraordinary book is the result of a period of Proustian recall which was triggered by being confined to bed when he was already an old man. There is a memory of an adored mother and a childhood lost and hyper-sensitivity and the love of solitude mingle with a sense of permanent exile, as if he has been shut out of some original Eden. Fear of extinction drove Hudson's passionate recourse to memory as the only means of preserving the past and language becomes the vehicle of that memory and the only refuge against extinction. If we want to discover the uniqueness and originality of Hudson, however, we must return to his criollo work. Among Argentine critics, his reputation has been well served by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada whose book, El Mundo Maravilloso de Guillermo Enrique Hudson (1951), contains an interesting account of Hudson's metaphysical world. For Estrada, Hudson is the supreme interpreter of Argentine reality “Nuestras cosas no han tenido poeta, pintor ni interprete semejante a Hudson, no lo tendran nunca”. For Jorge Luis Borges Borges, The Purple Land bears comparison with Huckleberry Finn as a great novel of the Americas.
 

Others:
Les Miserables

Web Ref of Interest: Digitized copies of Shakespeare's Works: Quarto - British Library
 

The flaming light of desire burning in his eyes turned her sick and faint. Her body throbbed with the consciousness of a knowledge that appalled her. She understood his purpose with a horror that made each separate nerve in her system shrink against the understanding that had come to her under the consuming fire of his ardent gaze, and in the fierce embrace that was drawing her shaking limbs closer and closer to the man's own pulsating body.  "Oh you brute! You brute!", she wailed, until his kisses silenced her.

Talk about purple prose! Critic's jaws dropped and they quickly proclaimed the book pornography. Readers bought it by the cartload and Mrs. Hull went on to write several more books, all set in Egypt and all featuring masterful men and masochistic women. Some of her other titles were The Sons of the Sheik and The Desert Healer. The movie version of The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino was a world-wide smash and made the desert sheik the number one sex-symbol of the day. Sheiks have gone in out of favor ever since, but have never totally faded away. As a matter of fact, Johanna Lindsey's Captive Bride is essentially a re-telling of Hull's story with the same basic plot elements and more explicit sex scenes. 
Three of the most popular woman writers of the early twentieth century were Elinor Glyn, E.M. Hull and Ethel M. Dell
 

Other: 
Read WORK WITH CHILDREN IN THE SMALL LIBRARY  ~ Library Journal, 1903, P. C53.
Values in Library Work with Children. ~ A. L. A. Proceedings, 1913  275 pages

 She wanted to be a writer and for that she had to study people. She worked as a waitress and as a salesgirl. She also did bit acting roles in the theater, attended night court and studied people on the street. Hurst was neither a radical or intellectual, but she was preoccupied with many social issues: equal pay for equal work, the right of a woman to retain her name after marriage, relief of the oppressed Jews in Eastern Europe, the social and medical  problems of homosexuals, etc.

Her first story, "Ain't Life Wonderful," had been published in Reedy's Weekly, a St. Louis newspaper, while she was attending college. There followed a string of rejections until 1912, when a second story was accepted and she received thirty dollars. Her writing talent was quickly recognized and the Saturday Evening Post wanted all of her future stories. Her novels and stories were eagerly greeted by the publishing world so that by 1925, she and Booth Tarkington were the highest paid writers in the United States. She became a long-time friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and supported the New Deal and labor. She chaired a national housing commission, 1936-37; the committee on workmen's compensation in 1940, a member of the national advisory committee to the Works Progress Administration, 1940-41; and she was a member of the board of directors of New rk Urban League.

Hurst was very active in raising funds for the refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1940s, a staunch supporter of Israel in  the 50s, and donated $50,000 to the support of writers. When she died, she left one million dollars to Brandeis and Washington Universities to establish professorships in creative writing. In 1915, she had secretly married pianist Jacques Danielson and they each had their own residence. When their marriage  was revealed in 1920, a New York Times editorial took them to task for having separate residences when there was a housing shortage. Hurst retaliated by stating that a married woman had the right to retain her own name, her own special life and her own personal liberty. They remained happily married until his death in 1952.

She was very sharp and to the point in vocalizing her views on the rights of women. When Justice Arthur Goldberg declared in 1962, "that it is time that we evaluated Women on merit and fitness for a job," she snapped back, "Time sir! You are a half century too late." Fannie Hurst died in New York City, on February 23, 1968, at the age of seventy-eight. She left behind her writings to stimulate the mind to the social issues that she had raised.
This is one of the 150 illustrated true stories of American heroism included in Jewish Heroes & Heroines of America :150 True Stories of American Jewish Heroism, © 1996, written by Seymour "Sy" Brody of Delray Beach, Florida, illustrated by Art Seiden of Woodmere, New York, and published by Lifetime Books, Inc., Hollywood, FL.
By Seymour "Sy" Brody