Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green

by Jeremy Treglown

Henry Green led a double life. As Henry Yorke, a descendant of the earl of Hardwicke and Baron Leconfield, he was a wealthy aristocrat, with a family fortune and an engineering plant in the British Midlands. As Henry Green (the pseudonym he settled on after trying out Henry Browne), he wrote nine of our century's most original novels, including Living, Party Going, Caught, and Loving all of which, with daringly experimental techniques, capture the psychological truths of ordinary life in dramatic, sometimes poignant, and often hilarious ways. Green also formed friendships and rivalries with many of his time's leading literary figures, including Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, Eudora Welty and Terry Southern. And he led an extravagantly messy personal life.

Jeremy Treglown, the highly praised biographer of Roald Dahl, discusses Green's novels in close connection with his life his unusual camaraderie with factory workers, his sympathy for servants, his ambivalence about his peers, his drinking, and his extramarital affairs. Treglown also shows how Green's portrayal of everyday uncertainties mirrored his efforts to understand his weaknesses and the chaotic conduct of his life efforts whose literary results, John Updike has said, bring the rectangle of the printed page alive like little else in English fiction of this century.

Genres: Nonfiction

352 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 2000

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another lovely birthday present. A critical biography of my favourite author!
Loved this, gives the novels their full due, dishes the gossip, the affairs and family life. So many writers loved him and his work. The last fifteen years where he declined into alcoholism and gave up writing are dealt with in a single chapter: not much to say I suppose and sad to linger on.
Living, Loving, Party Going and Concluding are all masterpieces.