Henry Green

Reproduction of the original: Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers by Henry Green

Few only are the remarks absolutely needed by way of introduction to a work which within itself sufficiently explains and carries out a new method of illustration for the dramas of Shakespeare. This book is the results of genuine study. The results arrived at, though imperfect, are also grounded on real similitudes between Shakespeare and his predecessors and contemporaries; and those similitudes, parallelisms, or adaptations of thought, by whichever name distinguished, often arose from the actual impression made on his mind and memory by the Emblematists whose works he had seen, read, and used.

A timeless work of social satire, set in the 1920s and considered one of the most insightful Modernist depictions of England's working class Living is a book about life in a factory town and the operations of a factory, from the workers on the floor to the boss in his office. The town is Birmingham and the factory is an iron foundry, like the one that Henry Green worked in for some time in the 1920s after dropping out of Oxford, and the stories--courtships, layoffs, getting dinner on the table, going to the pub, death--are all the ordinary stuff of life. The style, however, is pure Henry Green, at once starkly constrained and wildly streaked with the expedients and eccentricities of everyday speech--clich and innuendo, clashing metaphors, slips of tongue--which is to say it is like nothing else. Epic and antic, Living is a book of exact observation and deep tenderness, the work, in Rosamond Lehmann's words, of an "amorous and austere voluptuary" whose work continues to transform the novel.

Henry Green's first novel, and the book that began his career as a master of British modernism Blindness--Henry Green's first novel, begun while he was still at Eton and finished before he left university--is the story of John Haye, a young student with literary airs. It starts with an excerpt from his diary, brimming with excitement and affectation and curiosity about life and literature. Then a freak accident robs John of his sight, plunging him into despair. Forced to live with his high-handed, horsey stepmother in the country, John begins a weird dalliance with a girl named Joan, leading to a new determination. Blindness is the curse of youth and inexperience and love and ambition, but blindness, John will discover, can also be the source of vision.

Back is the story of Charley Summers, who is back from the war and a POW camp having lost the woman he loved, Rose, to illness before he left and his leg to fighting. In other words, Charley has very little to come back to, only memories, and on top of that he has been deeply traumatized by his experience of war. Rose's father introduces him to another young woman, Nancy, and Charley becomes convinced that she is in fact Rose and pursues her. Back is at once a Shakespearean comedy of mistaken identities, a voyage into the world of madness, and a celebration of the improbable healing powers of love.

This humorous novel is composed almost entirely of conversations. Some take place in the dining-room of a London hotel overlooking a park, some in a pub, some in the flat of the main character - a middle-aged woman, clever, charming and beautiful. By the author of "Living" and "Caught".

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.