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Rima's Mother

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Hoxie N. Fairchild*
Affiliation:
Hunter College New York, N. Y.

Extract

Admiration for the best qualities of W. H. Hudson it not inconsistent with a lively distaste for Rima, the bird-maiden of Green Mansions. One cannot believe in her as anything. Too avian to be human and too human to be preternatural, too unearthly to be a woman and too womanly to be a bird, she is the most striking example of the truth of Robert Hamilton's statement that the erotic element in Hudson's romances is “quite extraordinarily unconvincing.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 357 note 1 W. H. Hudson: The Vision of Earth (London, 1946), p. 51.

page 357 note 2 Green Mansions (London, 1931), p. 87. Hereafter, page references to this book will be inserted parenthetically in my text.

page 357 note 3 W. H. Hudson: A Portrait (New York, 1924), p. 118.

page 358 note 4 “The Creator of Rima,” Sewanee Review, XLI (1933), 24, 35.

page 359 note 5 “The Source-Book for Hudson's Green Mansions,” PMLA, LXI (1946), 252-257.

page 359 note 6 Ch. x, “The Child of Nature,” and Ch. xi, “Romantic Love and the Noble Savage,” The Noble Savage (New York, 1928).

page 360 note 7 Ibid., pp. 370, 371, 481.

page 363 note 8 Songs of a Wokers (London, 1881), pp. 153. 159-160. Colibri occupies pp. 131-166 of this voL Hereafter page referance to the Songs are inserted parenthetically in my text.

page 367 note 9 Roberts, pp. 166, 243. For more abundant evidence of Hudson's wide miscellaneous Belesenheit, see Herbert F. West, Hudson's Reading (Milwaukee: privately printed, 1947).

page 367 note 10 Roberts and those who have relied on him are wrong in saying that Hudson came to England in 1869 For conclusive proof that 1874 is the correct date see the editorial “Intro-duction” and “Postscript” of Hudson's Letters, on the Ornithology of Buenos Ayres, ed. David R. Dewar (Ithaca, N. Y., 1951).

page 368 note 11 Louise Chandler Moulton, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, His Life and Work (Cambridge and Chicago, 1894), p. 14.

page 368 note 12 DNB. Richard Garnett, the contributor of the O'Shaughnessy article, qualifies as an expert on this aspect of the poet's life because of his own long connection with the British Museum.

page 368 note 13 Roberts, p. 125.

page 368 note 14 Ibid., p. 205.

page 369 note 15 Not having observed this detail in reading Far Away and Long Ago, I rely here on Roberts, p. 5.

page 370 note 16 I wish to thank two Hudson experts, Prof. Herbert F. Wert and Mr. R. Gordon Wasson, for confirming me in the belief that Colibri has not hitherto been mentioned as a source for Green Mansions.