The Purple Land

The Englishman Richard Lamb is forced to flee to Montevideo, Uruguay after marrying an Argentinian girl without her father’s permission. When he’s unable to find work in the city, he curses the country and its inhabitants, wishing that it was still ruled by England. Looking for work in the countryside, he finds adventure and romance while reexamining his beliefs about freedom and civilization. The Purple Land is W. H. Hudson’s first novel. Ill-received by both critics and the public when first published, it was reevaluated in later years, with Jorge Luis Borges saying that it was “perhaps unexcelled by any work of Gaucho literature.” Hudson was raised in the Argentine pampas, where he spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna. In 1874 he moved to England, and was shocked by the ecological changes that industrialization had brought; this contrast helped inform the background of The Purple Land.