W. H. Hudson

31:1, Book Reviews throughout corrects, often quite convincingly, conventional notions of Owen: too much has been made of Owen's passion for Keats (Shelley and Wilde figure more strongly as Owen matured); Owen learned to write satire as much from Harold Munro as from Sassoon; Owen's debt to French literature has been generally overlooked; much more than front-line experience created Owen's mature style; the circumstances of Owen's shell shock and the charges of cowardice brought against him should be recalled; pararhyme was not invented for war poems but for erotic songs in the Decadent style; the relationship with Sassoon was more one-sided than is now usuaUy supposed; the fragmentary nature of Owen's famous "Preface" should not be forgotten. Also Hibberd has given us the first fairly detailed account of the "Perseus" fragments, and indeed one of the most thorough considerations of the early poems, and has shown the complexity, the pervasiveness, and the persistence to the very end of the influence of Romanticism on Owen. It will be very difficult after this book to repeat the standard line that from 1916 Owen tried to get rid of the Romantic elements in his poetry and under the pressure of his war experiences turned himself into a "modern" poet. Owen's may have been "perhaps the last Romantic undertaking in English poetry," as Hibberd summarily says in the "Preface" (ix); it is at least debatable. What is not is the obvious continued presence of Romantic elements in the very enterprise of the critical biography this late in the twentieth century. As a result, just as the Hibberd and Onions anthology is most valuable as a supplement to other anthologies that concern themselves with quality and not just representativeness, so this book, in failing to restrain itself by the disciplines of either criticism or biography, cannot avoid also being an adjunct, perhaps more valuably to John Stallworthy's biography (1974) and more generally to literary history itself, that of the early years of this century. But, unlike the anthology, the supplemental value here resides only in parts of the book: we must edit it to use it. Richard Hoffpauir University of Alberta W. H. HUDSON Amy D. Ronner. W. H. Hudson: the Man, the Novelist, the Naturalist. New York: AMS Press, 1986. $27.50 Dr. Ronner declares her book to be for those who have "at least read and appreciated [Hudson's romance] Green Mansions." She aims to give them "a concise overview of the real Hudson," and an awareness of the "remarkable variety" of his oeuvre. Green Mansions is atypical of Hudson's work, but it was Ronner's first experience of him, and this, together with her emphasis on his fiction rather than on the round dozen English countryside books on which his British reputation is firmly founded, perhaps explains the restrictive 100 31:1, Book Reviews "novelist" of her title and her notion that all Hudson's readers "enjoy dreaming of, or temporarily believing in, impossibilities." Nevertheless concern with his fiction is one of the strengths of her study, for with the exception of Green Mansions it is the aspect of his work that has received least attention in the past. Ronner early discerns the "common denominators" unifying all Hudson's writings to be nature worship and an abhorrence of confinement. Without wishing to abandon the finer things of civilization he essayed to fuse with nature, and like nature resisted all forms of confinement from the caging of wild birds to pressures upon him to be either naturalist or prose-poet—scientist or artist— instead of an amalgam of both laced with good measure of religious and artistic philosophy. Within his ambit of "field naturalist" he claimed both, and Ronner 's chapter IV on this subject gives a splendidly clear, concise, rational explanation of this complex aspect of his character and convictions. Skilfully she constructs a convincing portrait of her subject—his attitudes, beliefs and aspirations—primarily from his own books into which, according to his friend and distinguished literary adviser, Edward Garnett, Hudson "felt . . . he had distilled the lasting essence of his life and character." She argues, however, that in one particular...