Blindness [Paperback]

Henry Green's first novel, and the book that began his career as a master of British modernism

Blindness—Henry Green’s first novel, begun while he was still at Eton and finished before he left university—is the story of John Haye, a young student with literary airs. It starts with an excerpt from his diary, brimming with excitement and affectation and curiosity about life and literature. Then a freak accident robs John of his sight, plunging him into despair. Forced to live with his high-handed, horsey stepmother in the country, John begins a weird dalliance with a girl named Joan, leading to a new determination. Blindness is the curse of youth and inexperience and love and ambition, but blindness, John will discover, can also be the source of vision.“A quite astonishing tour de force...it announced the entry on the literary stage of the most genuinely original novelist of his day.... [Green] had an ear which was most delicately and sensitively attuned to every cadence and nuance of the English language as it is actually spoken.”—Encounter
 
“Writers do not need to see but to feel, to get away from reality by closing their eyes to it. This exchange of the sensual for the cerebral is a sacrifice without which no art will be made. It is symbolized overpoweringly inBlindness.”—John Sturrock,The Times Literary Supplement
 
“[Blindness] is a polished piece of energetic young work that students of the 20th-century novel’s development will be eager to examine. And Green’s admirers will welcome a significant addition to his relatively small canon.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Green’s remains the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time.”—Eudora Welty
 
“Green’s novels reproduce as few do the actual sensations of living.lĂ*