Henry Green is the pseudonym of Henry Yorke, one of the twentieth century's most lauded and most neglected novelists. He writes in his autobiography, Pack My Bag (1940): “Names distract, nicknames are too easy and if leaving both out make a book look blind then that to my mind is no disadvantage.” His own change of name is intimately connected to an elusive narrative viewpoint and a series of characters looking often vainly for self-definition. The question of who Henry Yorke or Henry Green are exercises everyone who has written of either. James Wood wrote in 1999 that Green was one of “the last true magi of language, the last serious European modernists”. V. S. Pritchett has called him “a spirit of poetry, fantasy, and often w

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First published 30 June 2002

Citation: Barry, Elizabeth. "Henry Green". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5057, accessed 9 February 2010.]