Green Mansions

Lavishly illustrated with 60 drawings by Keith Henderson, W.H. Hudson’s most famous novel, Green Mansions, is the book that sparked the nature conservation movement.

A master of natural history writing, W.H. Hudson forms a link between 19th-century Romanticism and the 20th-century ecological movement.

First published in 1904, Green Mansions owes much of its success to the mystic, near-religious feelings that pervade the story. Hudson’s halting, poetic expressions combined with his descriptions of untouched natural beauty make the novel as powerful a call back to nature today as it was more than 100 years ago.

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 aboriginal race. 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 bitter reality of the encounter between "savage" and "civilized" man.

The inspiration for the movie starring Audrey Hepburn, Green Mansions stunningly recreates the untouched forests of South America with amazing detail.