The Green Child
First edition
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| Author | Herbert Read |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Published | 1935 (Heinemann) |
The Green Child is the only completed novel by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read. Written in 1934 and first published by Heinemann in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit, speaking an apparently unknown language. Read described the legend in his English Prose Style, published in 1931, as "the norm to which all types of fantasy should conform".
Each of the novel's three parts ends with the apparent death of the story's protagonist, President Olivero, dictator of the fictional South American Republic of Roncador. In each case Olivero's death is an allegory for his translation to a "more profound level of existence", reflecting the book's overall theme of a search for the meaning of life. Read's interest in psychoanalytic theory is evident throughout the novel, which is constructed as a "philosophic myth ... in the tradition of Plato".
The story contains many autobiographical elements, and the character of Olivero owes much to Read's experiences as an officer in the British Army during the First World War. The novel was positively received, although some commentators have considered it to be "inscrutable", and one has suggested that it has been so differently and vaguely interpreted by those who have given it serious study that it may lack the form and content to justify the praise it has received.
Primarily a literary critic, poet, and an advocate for modern art, Read wrote his only novel, The Green Child, in about eight weeks during 1934, most of it in the summer house behind his home in Hampstead, London. Hampstead was then a "nest of gentle artists" who included Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, and Barbara Hepworth. Read was at that time interested in the idea of unconscious composition, and the first sixteen pages of the manuscript – written on different paper from the rest – are considered by some critics to look like the recollection of a dream. Read claimed in a letter written to psychoanalyst Carl Jung that the novel was a product of automatic writing. As of 2018, the original manuscript is in the possession of the University of Leeds Library; Read had been a student at the university.
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