Born in the Argentine, far from England's countryside and literary life, and only beginning to gain attention in his forties with The Purple Land that England Lost (1885), William Henry Hudson achieved at the last such prominence that the Times described him, on his death in 1922, as being "unsurpassed as an English writer on Nature." Some of the best-known figures of the Georgian literary world were among his admirers: the novelist John Galsworthy wrote the preface to Hudson's autobiographical Far Away and Long Ago (1918), and the publisher's reader Edward Garnett, a legendary discoverer of talent and an important figure in Hudson's later career, provided the preface to his last completed book of essays, A Traveller in Little Things (1921). Hudson's reputation at that time rested on two kinds of writing: his South American romances and his books of outdoor essays, mainly on English subjects, though begun in Argentine Ornithology (1888, 1889). The...