The Source-Book for Hudson's Green Mansions

Extract

In the forty-two years since its publication, there has grown up around Hudson's Green Mansions and its heroine, the forest-girl Rima, an aura of mystery which has been rather deepened than dispelled by Hudson's editors and biographers. “If there was any secret about Rima,” says one of them, “forty years of friendship never discovered it to me … Sometimes I have thought that there was a Rima, some woodland child whom the boy Hudson had loved, and then again I come back to the thought I now hold to, that she is the embodiment, but no more than that, of all his imaginations concerning the girl-woman who would have satisfied his body and soul.” Later the same writer elaborates on the concept of Rima as Hudson's spiritual mate. “His opposed contrasted figures grew out of the soil, and if Rima seems to come down from heaven, she was yet a being who sprang living from his memory of some white and lovely children, whom he had known on the pampa.” Such words as these merely add mist to mystery, and romancing to romance, an editorial tendency in which less ecstatic commentators than Mr. Roberts will hesitate to concur.