Pack My Bag

The autobiography of Henry Green, one of the twentieth century's finest writers, is as unconventional and brilliant as its author-subject.

Shines with the same marvellous originality, intuition, sensuality and finish as his novels

Green's works live on with ever-brightening intensity

Green's books are solid and glittering as gems

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. Born in 1905 near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, he was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become managing director of an engineering business, writing novels in his spare time. His first novel, Blindness (1926) was written whilst he was still at school and published whilst he was at Oxford. He married in 1929 and had one son, and during the Second World War served in the London Fire Brigade. Between 1926 and 1952 he wrote nine novels, Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing and Doting, and a memoir, Pack My Bag. Henry Green died in December 1973

Henry Green wrote his autobiography in 1940, aged only thirty-five, because he was convinced he wouldn't survive the war. The result is a delightfully wayward and incisive portrait of English society and of the man himself. From reminiscences of a childhood spent among the gentry, to searing descriptions of Eton and Oxford, to reflections on the author's first experiments with prose and with sex, all Green's unique talents as a writer are on offer here, at their most dazzling and accessible.

Blindness

Henry Green was born in 1905 and spent his youth in his family home in the West Country. After his education as Eton and Oxford he worked with his father in an engineering company, but pursued a parallel career as a novelist.

Blindness is Henry Green's first novel. Begun when the author was still at school, it tells the story of a clever and artistic boy who, blinded in a senseless accident, turns to writing with powers extraordinarily heightened by his affliction. With a total lack of sentimentality Henry Green explores the youth's adaptation to his changed and darkened life. 
 
Blindness has been much referred to and much discussed by Green's admirers, but for many years has been impossible to obtain. Its reissue coincides with the increasing recognition of Green's stature as a major modern English novelist.

Party Going

The most gifted prose writer of his generation

Each of Green's books stands apart from the others as a separate feat in itself

Green's novels are sufficiently unlikle any others, sufficiently assured in their perilous, luminous fullness, to warrant the epithet incomparable...they have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England...Green's human qualities - his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss - make him a precious witness to any age

Green's works live with ever-brightening intensity--it's like dancing with Nijinsky or Astaire, who lead you effortlessly on.

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.

Doting

Satirizing the tedium of upper-middle-class life in post-war London, this novel depicts a world in which substance is far less important to anyone than appearance. The question asked throughout the text concerns the differences between doting and loving.

Living

LIVING, as an early novel, marks the beginning of Henry Green's career as a writer who made his name by exploring class distinctions through the medium of love. Set in an iron foundry in Birmingham, LIVING grittily and entertainingly contrasts the lives of the workers and the owners

Nothing, Doting, Blindness

A contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, admired by Elizabeth Bowen and W.H. Auden, Henry Green is a neglected master of 20th century literature who is ripe for rediscovery.

Experimental in tone; spare and sensuous by turns, irradiated by stylistic fireworks... his novels are dazzling exercises in form

One cannot think of another modernist writer so neglected and yet so warmly humane

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century... his writing is wonderfully seductive - as oblique, suggestive and full of surprises as life itself

The most curious imagination in the English novel

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY D. J. TAYLOR 
 
These three brilliant novels span Henry Green's career as a novelist and display his unique talents as a writer. Nothing is a tale of the merry-go-round of love, marriage and infidelity, and the ceaseless tussle of innocence versus experience. Doting sets the middle-aged male infatuation for pretty girls against the comfortable affection of wives and old friends, delving into the complications of burgeoning affairs and boring marriages. In Blindness, Green's first novel, a young man is blinded in a senseless accident but thereafter discovers new imaginative powers.

Henry Green

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

His novels made more of a stylistic impact on me than those of any writer, living or dead

These novels offer a glimpse of class in wartime and postwar Britain with wit and style thrown into the mix.

Dazzling, daring and full of original insight and wit, Henry Green offers a unique view of a class-ridden Britain enduring both war and its aftermath. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz, so brilliantly evoked in Caught, gossip spreads like wildfire and the lives of two men are torn apart. In Back, Charley, an amputee, returns from a prison camp to his village and the grave of the woman he loved. Concluding was Green's own favourite of his novels and tells the story of a summer's day and a schoolgirl's disappearance. 
 
The text of Caught used in this edition is based on Green's original manuscript, which was censored by the publisher on first publication, but can be read now for the first time in unexpurgated form.

Henry Green

Praise for Caught, Back, Concluding

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

The finest living English novelist

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

The finest living English novelist

The greatest of the English modernists after [DH] Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

Henry Green's novels are among the most dazzling, inventive and individual of the last century

The finest living English novelist

Books by Henry Green

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