Henry Green

Describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers, the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe.

Loving

A group of rich, spoiled and idle young people heading off on a winter holiday are stranded at a railway station when their train is delayed by thick, enclosing fog. PARTY GOING describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below.

Party Going

Daniel Adam Mendelsohn

Henry Green's first novel, and the book that began his career as a master of British modernism Blindness--Henry Green's first novel, begun while he was still at Eton and finished before he left university--is the story of John Haye, a young student with literary airs. It starts with an excerpt from his diary, brimming with excitement and affectation and curiosity about life and literature. Then a freak accident robs John of his sight, plunging him into despair. Forced to live with his high-handed, horsey stepmother in the country, John begins a weird dalliance with a girl named Joan, leading to a new determination. Blindness is the curse of youth and inexperience and love and ambition, but blindness, John will discover, can also be the source of vision.

Blindness

Class distinction is the common theme: between masters and servants in an Irish castle, owners and workers in a foundry, and the wealthy and working class in a railway station

Loving ; Living ; Party Going

"The best writer of his time." Rebecca West

Back

Written almost completely in dialogue, Henry Green's final novel is a biting comedy of manners that exposes the deceptive difference between those who love and those who "dote." Arthur Middleton is a middle-aged member of the upper-middle class living in post-World War II London with his wife. Stuck in a passionless marriage, Arthur becomes infatuated with Annabel, a much younger woman. Their relationship sets into motion a series of intertwining affairs between five close friends less concerned with love than with their attempts to keep the other lovers apart.

Doting

Adam Thirlwell

Living

During the Blitz, Henry Green served on the London Auxiliary Fire Service, and this experience lies behind Caught, published when the bombing had only recently ended. Like Green, Richard Roe, the hero of this resolutely unheroic book, comes from the upper class. His wife remains at their country estate, far from the threatened city, while Roe serves under Pye, a professional fireman whose deranged sister once kidnapped Roe’s young son, a bad memory that complicates the relationship between these two very different men. The book opens as the various members of the brigade are having practice runs and fighting boredom and sleeping around in the months before the attack from the air. It ends with Roe, who has been injured in the bombing, back in the country, describing and trying to come to terms with the apocalyptic conflagration in which he and his fellows were caught, putting into question the very notion of ordinary life. Caught was censored at the insistence of its publisher, Leonard Woolf, when it came out in 1943. This is the first American edition of the book to appear as Green intended.

Caught

Amit Chaudhuri

Years ago, Jane Weatherby had a torrid affair with John Pomfret, the husband of her best friend. Divorces ensued. World War II happened. Prewar partying gave way to postwar austerity, and Jane and John’s now-grown children, Philip and Mary, both as serious and sober as their parents were not, seem earnestly bent on marriage, which John and Jane consider a mistake. The two old lovers conspire against the two young lovers, and nothing turns out quite as expected. Nothing, like the closely related Doting, is a book that is almost entirely composed in dialogue, since in these late novels nothing so interested Green as how words resist, twist, and expose our intentions; how they fail us, lead us on, make fools of us, and may, in spite of ourselves, even save us, at least for a time. Nothing spills over with the bizarre and delicious comedy and poetry of human incoherence.

Nothing

"As the story opens, two students are missing. The resultant search for their whereabouts raises numerous fears and questions: have they been harmed? have they left on their own, alone? or have they perhaps been persuaded by the school's only male instructor, Sebastian Birt? how will the governesses keep the news from parents and State authorities until the girls have been found and an "acceptable" story contrived? will Rock report them for negligence?

Concluding

"A collection of work by Henry Green is introduced by John Updike and includes never-before-published short stories, pieces on London during the Blitz, journalism, book reviews, a play, and more"--

Stories, Essays, Interviews

Surviving

"Blindness is a major novel . . . Every character and every scene is shot through with significance after significance." The Times [London]

Loving is set in the vast hereditary house of the Tennants, an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, but the story mainly involves their servants. The war has led to a scarcity of experienced staff, and when Eldon the butler dies, Raunce the head footman is assigned his job. The other servants are taken aback by this irregular promotion, but lovely young Edith, a recent hire, is quite attracted to the older Raunce and a flirtation begins. And it is Edith who discovers Mrs. Tennant’s daughter-in-law, whose husband is fighting at the front, in bed with a neighbor one morning, scandalizing the whole household. When the Tennants depart for England, Raunce is left in charge of the house and struggles to control its disputatious inhabitants as well as to secure the love of Edith, especially after a precious family jewel disappears. In Loving, Henry Green explores the deeply precarious nature of ordinary life against the background of the larger world at war.

Caught (London Writing)

Henry Green's first novel, and the book that began his career as a master of British modernism Blindness—Henry Green’s first novel, begun while he was still at Eton and finished before he left university—is the story of John Haye, a young student with literary airs. It starts with an excerpt from his diary, brimming with excitement and affectation and curiosity about life and literature. Then a freak accident robs John of his sight, plunging him into despair. Forced to live with his high-handed, horsey stepmother in the country, John begins a weird dalliance with a girl named Joan, leading to a new determination. Blindness is the curse of youth and inexperience and love and ambition, but blindness, John will discover, can also be the source of vision.

Loving, Living, Party Going

-- Jane Weatherby wants a more exciting match for her son than Mary Pomfret and decides to take action to break off their engagement. Central to her schemes is Mary's father, John, who used to be Jane's lover and just might be again. Narrated mainly through Henry Green's incomparable comic dialogue, Nothing is a satiric comedy of manners.-- First published in the U.S. by Viking (1950), most recent paperback edition published by Penguin in the collection Nothing; Doting, Blindness (1993).

Henry Green

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