Henry Green Critical Essay | Monroe Engel

SOURCE: "Henry Green: Eros and Persistence," in Antaeus, No. 63, Autumn, 1989, pp. 97-109.

Below, Engel relates the theme of love and "a hope for transformation" in Green's novels to questions of class and gender. He also speculates on why Green stopped writing.

The case of a writer of great accomplishment who ceases to practice his calling while still apparently in full possession of his creative powers is tantalizing. E. M. Forster, for example, lived nearly half a century after the publication of Passage to India in 1924 without producing another novel. There are ways to think about Forster's career however that can mitigate regret. It seems entirely possible that he was, as his biographer P. N. Furbank suggests, "one of those who have 'only one novel to write,'" and that Passage to India was so full and telling a dramatization of his social vision that any novel that followed...
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