The novel tells the story of Richard Lamb, a young Englishman who marries a teenage Argentinian girl, Paquita, without asking her father's permission, and is forced to flee to Montevideo, Uruguay with his bride. Lamb leaves his young wife with a relative while he sets off for eastern Uruguay to find work for himself. He soon becomes embroiled in adventures with the Uruguayan gauchos and romances with local women. Lamb unknowingly helps a rebel guerrilla general, Santa Coloma, escape from prison and joins his cause. However, the rebels are defeated in battle and Lamb has to flee in disguise. He helps Demetria, the daughter of an old rebel leader, escape from her persecutors and returns to Montevideo. Lamb, Paquita, Demetria and Santa Coloma evade their government pursuers by slipping away on a boat bound for Buenos Aires. Here the novel ends, but in the opening paragraphs, Lamb had already informed the reader that after the events of the story he was captured by Paquita's father and thrown into prison for three years, during which time Paquita herself died of grief.
By : William Henry Hudson (1841 - 1922)
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This work was first issued in 1885, by Messrs. Sampson Low, in two slim volumes, with the longer, and to most persons, enigmatical title of The Purple Land That England Lost. A purple land may be found in almost any region of the globe, and 'tis of our gains, not our losses, we keep count. A few notices of the book appeared in the papers, one or two of the more serious literary journals reviewing it (not favourably) under the heading of “Travels and Geography”; but the reading public cared not to buy, and it very shortly fell into oblivion. There it might have remained for a further period of nineteen years, or for ever, since the sleep of a book is apt to be of the unawakening kind, had not certain men of letters, who found it on a forgotten heap and liked it in spite of its faults, or because of them, concerned themselves to revive it.
We are often told that an author never wholly loses his affection for a first book, and the feeling has been likened (more than once) to that of a parent towards a first-born. I have not said it, but in consenting to this reprint I considered that a writer's early or unregarded work is apt to be raked up when he is not standing by to make remarks. He may be absent on a journey from which he is not expected to return. It accordingly seemed better that I should myself supervise a new edition, since this would enable me to remove a few of the numerous spots and pimples which decorate the ingenious countenance of the work before handing it on to posterity.
Besides many small verbal corrections and changes, the deletion of some paragraphs and the insertion of a few new ones, I have omitted one entire chapter containing the Story of a Piebald Horse, recently reprinted in another book entitled El Ombù. I have also dropped the tedious introduction to the former edition, only preserving, as an appendix, the historical part, for the sake of such of my readers as may like to have a few facts about the land that England lost.
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