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.

William Henry Hudson was an Anglo-Argentine author, naturalist and ornithologist. Argentines consider him to belong to their national literature as Guillermo Enrique Hudson, the Spanish version of his name. He spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna and observing natural and human dramas on then a lawless frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society, initially in an English mingled with Spanish idioms. He settled in England during 1869. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888-1889) and British Birds (1895), and later achieved fame with his books on the English countryside, including Hampshire days (1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd’s Life (1910). People best know his nonfiction in Far Away and Long Ago (1918). His other works include: The Purple Land (That England Lost) (1885), A Crystal Age (1887),The Naturalist in La Plata (1892),A Little Boy Lost (1905), Birds in Town and Village (1919),Dead Man’s Plack and an Old Thorn (1920), and A Traveller in Little Things (1921).

Collector's Notes.