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. The inspiration for the movie starring Audrey Hepburn, Green Mansions stunningly recreates the untouched forests of South America with amazing detail. 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.  A master of natural history writing, W.H. Hudson forms a link between nineteenth-century Romanticism and the twentieth-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 makes Green Mansions as powerful call back to nature today as it was one hundred years ago.