The Green Child

The Green Child is the only completed novel by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read. Written in 1934, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit. 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.

About The Green Child in brief

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. 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. 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. Read claimed in a letter written to psychoanalyst Carl Jung that the novel was a product of automatic writing. As of 2020, the original manuscript is in the possession of the University of Leeds Library; Read had been a student at the university. There have been six editions of The Green Child, the first from HeinemANN in 1935. The first American edition was published in New York by New Directions in 1948, with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth. Penguin Books published a fifth edition in 1979, which included the 1947 introduction by Greene. A sixth edition, published by R. Clark and again containing Greene’s introduction, appeared in 1989 and was reprinted in 1995. 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.

It was written at a time when Read’s political and philosophical ideas were in flux. Increasingly his political ideology leaned towards anarchism, but it was not until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 that Read became confirmed in his anarchist beliefs and stated them explicitly. The book’s overall theme of a search for the meaning of life is reflected in the main character Olivero’s search for his translation to a more profound level of existence. It is told as a third-person narrative, but the middle part is written in the first person. It has been described as a ‘philosophic myth’ in the tradition of Plato’s ‘Philosophism’ The first and last parts of the book are told as an ‘unconscious composition’, with the first 16 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 was at that time interested in the idea of unconscious composition, and he wrote 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. The novel has been published by Grey Walls Press, with a second edition, and a third edition, for which Graham Greene wrote an introduction focusing on the novel  in 1947. A fourth edition, with illustrations by Felix Kelly, was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1947, and again in 1989.

Related posts:

Emma Goldman Green children of Woolpit Hemming’s Cartulary Tom Green