Green Mansions
This novel of a man’s yearning for an ethereal woman of the forest is “an unforgettable depiction of love and suffering, remorse and transcendence” (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post).
This Edwardian-era “masterpiece” (The New York Times), lavishly illustrated with sixty drawings by Keith Henderson, sparked the nature conservation movement and inspired the film of the same name starring Audrey Hepburn. Green Mansions stunningly recreates the untouched forests of South America with amazing detail. After a failed revolution, Abel is forced to seek refuge in the virgin forests of southwestern Venezuela. There, in his “green mansion,” Abel meets the wood-nymph Rima, the last of a reclusive indigenous people. The bird-girl’s ethereal presence captivates him completely, but the love that blossoms is soon darkened by cruelty and sorrow.
Exploring a love somewhere between reality and imagination, Green Mansions is a poignant meditation on the loss of wilderness, the dream of a return to nature, and the relationship between savagery and civilization. A master of natural history writing, W.H. Hudson forms a link between nineteenth-century Romanticism and the twentieth-century ecological movement in a tale pervaded by mysticism—a novel as powerful today as it was over a century ago.
W.H. Hudson
William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. Hudson was born in the Quilmes Partido in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, son of settlers of U.S. origin. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, initially in an English mingled with Spanish idioms. Hudson settled in England during 1869. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888-1899) and British Birds (1895), and later achieved fame with his books on the English countryside, including Hampshire Day (1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd's Life (1910), which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s. He was a founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Hudson's best known novel is Green Mansions (1904), and his best known non-fiction is Far Away and Long Ago (1918). In Argentina, Hudson is considered to belong to the national literature as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, the Spanish version of his name. A town in Berazategui Partido and several other public places and institutions are named after him. Towards the end of his life, Hudson moved to Worthing in Sussex, England. His grave is in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery in Worthing.
