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.