Book description
Old Mr Rock, a widower, lives in a cottage with his granddaughter
Elizabeth; his household includes Daisy the pig, Ted the goose and
Alice the cat, but an additional member threatens in the person of
Sebastian Birt, the schoolteacher whom Elizabeth wants to marry. Birt
teaches in the state institution for girls run by two authoritarian
spinsters, the inseparable Misses Edge and Baker.
One sunny summer's morning, the morning of the Founders' Day Ball,
as Mr Rock goes up to the school to fetch his pig-swill for Daisy, it
is discovered that two of the girls have gone missing in the night. As
he pursues the unfolding events of this crowded day and eavesdrops on
the conversations up at the school and down at the cottage, Henry
Green subtly teases out all the hidden ambitions and lusts, the
suspicions and jealousies that are rife just beneath the placid
surface of the institution. With an unmatched ear for dialogue and an
absolute mastery in the depiction of character, he imbues this
apparently routine school day with a powerful charge of drama and
superb comic effect.
Henry Green is the pen-name for Henry Vincent Yorke, the son of a
prosperous Midlands industrialist. He was born near Tewkesbury in 1905
and was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he wrote his first novel,
Blindness,
published in 1926. He entered the family business on the factory-floor,
and went on to run the firm while writing eight other novels (all to be
reissued as Harvill paperbacks). For Angus Wilson he was "one of
the few really considerable English novelists of our time", while
W. H. Auden considered him to be "the finest living English
novelist". Henry Green died in 1973.
