Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
A failed revolutionary attempt drives the hero of Hudson's novel to seek refuge in the primeval forests of south-western Venezuela. There, in the 'green mansions' of the title, Abel encounters the wood-nymph Rima, the last survivor of a mysterious aboriginal race. The love that flowers between them is soon overshadowed by cruelty and sorrow... One of the acknowledged masters of natural history writing, W. H. Hudson forms an important link between nineteenth-century Romanticism and the twentieth-century ecological movement. First published in 1904 and a bestseller after its reissue a dozen years later, Green Mansions offers its readers a poignant meditation on the loss of wilderness, the dream of a return to nature, and the bitter reality of the encounter between savage and civilized man.Synopsis
The story of a Venezuelan political exile and the "bird-girl" he discovers in a remote jungle, this "Romance of the Tropical Forest" drew praise from such celebrated writers as Joseph Conrad and John Galsworthy. For decades the tale was greatly admired by both the general public and literary connoisseurs, even adapted as a Classics Illustrated comic book in 1951 and an MGM film in 1959. Today Green Mansions is of special interest for its ecological implications for the Amazon Basin, its poetic style and ambiguities, and the Romantic sweep of its tale about Abel and Rima, doomed lovers amidst an exotic setting.
About the Author
William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was raised on the pampas of Argentina by parents who were emigrants from the United States. He left for England in 1874, where he lived for decades in great poverty, struggling to make a living as a writer. It was only in 1916, when he was seventy-five, that Green Mansions was reprinted to great acclaim-the first book published by Alfred A. Knopf-making Hudson an almost overnight literary celebrity.