Green Mansions

A failed revolutionary attempt drives the European Abel to seek refuge in the virgin forests of southwestern Venezuela. There, in the "green mansion" of the title, Abel encounters the wood-nymph Rima, the last survivor of a mysterious aboriginal race. The bird-girl's ethereal presence captivates him completely, but the love that flowers between them is soon blighted by cruelty and sorrow. A master 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 still a best-seller after its reissue a dozen years later, the book owes much of its popularity to the mystic, near-religious feeling that pervades the story and to the beauty of Rima's halting, poetic expressions. Exploring a love somewhere between reality and imagination, 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.