It is not easy to categorize W. H. Hudson (as he preferred to be called). He was not primarily a fiction writer, yet his best known book, and perhaps his best book, was a novel, Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904), which has retained its place as a minor classic. Generically, it is related to the romance, with the preoccupation of that genre with the fantastic and marvelous. In this respect, it has affinities with other works that belong to the efflorescence of romance around the turn of the century (including writers such as Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and George Macdonald), as well as an obvious ancestry in the Romantic narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Yet Hudson also wrote as a naturalist, producing work of genuine scientific value, as well as more personal accounts of nature...