The Green Child (Felix Kelly) (1945)

When The Green Child was first published in 1935 critics of widely divergent views were unanimous in enthusiastic comment. Writing in Horizon, Mr. Graham Greene found that Mr. Read had conveyed in this curious and beautiful Romance the vision and sensuality of “the private sense of glory” which imbues the creative work of great Christian artists. From The Morning Post Mr. Louis MacNeice sensed the flavour of Defoe and Swift in Mr. Read’s “even, pure and exact” prose. A point which Mr. Edwin Muir stressed in The Listener, adding a tribute to the book’s “organic fusion of thought and imagination into a crystalline beauty.” Mr. Austin Clarke (The Observer) drew the reader’s attention to the parallel between our human affairs and Mr. Read’s “fairyland” of ideas, while Mr. Sean O’Faolain (The Spectator) emphatically declared The Green Child to be “a novel of a peculiar order, rarefied in the mind.” Quite recently, writing in a tributary volume to Herbert Read, Mr. Robert Melville praises this Romance along with the “finest of all Pushkin’s stories.”

Such a modern classic could not, we knew, be left in the out-of-print department and we felt justified in reissuing a limited edition. The Green Child is a book for all times; particularly for today when spiritual values are in danger of rapid depreciation.

Mr. Felix Kelly, a young New Zealand artist whose work was so highly commended when exhibited recently at the Lefevre Galleries, has embodied in his illustrations all the vivid imaginative beauty and compelling quality of Mr. Read’s text.

Condition: Dust-wrapper worn and spotted with a segment of loss running across the top edge of its rear panel and another segment of loss to head of spine. Spotting to pastedowns and endpapers. Grey cloth boards a little worn with some faint spotting, otherwise very good.