A Shepherd’s Life, first published in 1910, is a story principally about William Henry Hudson’s yearning to escape from the world of men and engross himself in nature — “the wild, the real life”.
Far from the rolling downs of Wiltshire, where his account of rural life is set, Hudson was born in Argentina in 1841 to American parents. A naturalist and ornithologist, he spent his youth studying and writing about the landscapes of Argentina. Moving to London in his thirties, Hudson’s hatred for all things urban was sharpened — “endless thoroughfares and innumerable people, all apparently in a desperate hurry to do something, yet doing nothing”.
Luckily Hudson found refuge in his love affair with the English countryside. A Shepherd’s Life is a fictionalised memoir of Hudson’s rambles and the people he meets along the way; it focuses on Isaac and Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherding father and son who the narrator admires for their modest living. Illuminated throughout is Hudson’s love for animals, nature and “pleasure in the open air”. The shepherds’ various sheepdogs seem especially adored, one of them named Badger, “the very best stump-tail [Caleb] ever had to help him”.
A Shepherd’s Life inspired James Rebanks’s 2015 bestseller, The Shepherd’s Life. Rebanks says of it that “when I was in my teens I discovered [this] amazing old book. It told the story of an old shepherd in the south of England at the turn of the 2oth century and I loved it because it felt like it was about my grandfather.”
A Shepherd’s Life by WH Hudson, Penguin Classics, 230pp; £8.99