[1] Written in 1934 and first published by Heinemann in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit, speaking an apparently unknown language.

Primarily a literary critic, poet, and an advocate for modern art, Read wrote his only novel, The Green Child, in about eight weeks during 1934, most of it in the summer house behind his home in Hampstead, London.

[1] Read was at that time interested in the idea of unconscious composition, and the first sixteen pages of the manuscript – written on different paper from the rest – are considered by some critics to look like the recollection of a dream.

[6] Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 Read became a supporter of communism, believing it to offer "the social liberty of my ideals",[9] but by the 1930s his conviction had begun to waver.

Increasingly his political ideology leaned towards anarchism, but it was not until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 that Read became confirmed in his anarchist beliefs and stated them explicitly.

[6] Christian faith might have borne poorer fruits than this sense of unattainable glory lodged in the child's brain on a Yorkshire farm forty years ago.

On the evening of his arrival, Olivero notices that the stream running through the village appears to be flowing backwards, and he decides to follow the water upstream to discover the cause.

The stream's course leads Olivero to a mill, where through a lighted window he sees a woman tied to a chair, forced by the miller to drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb.

He travels to London initially, hoping to find employment as a writer, but after three years spent working as a bookkeeper in a tailor's shop he takes passage on a ship which lands him in Cádiz, Spain.

Eventually he realises that his style of government is leading the country into stagnation and "moral flaccidity";[16] he begins to feel nostalgia for the English village where he was brought up, and resolves to escape.

[18] Olivero soon tires of the first ledge, and leaving Siloēn behind he moves to the second, where he learns to cut and polish crystals, the most sacred of objects in this subterranean world.

The "fluid, seemingly unbroken hand" in which it is written has encouraged the notion that it was produced in a single sitting, followed by a break before the second part was begun.

[28] Socrates' suggestion, towards the end of the Phaedo, that our own world is but one of many, each a hollow in the earth connected by underground rivers, is a strikingly similar image to the subterranean land of the Green people that Read describes.

[3] The Green people's emphasis on achieving "a literal oneness with the material universe" by petrifying the bodies of their dead, although it has "repulsed" some readers, is a vehicle that allows Read to parody the "traditional Western religious notion of the soul aspiring to rise through air to a vaporous paradise".

[6] The original title was an allusion to William Wordsworth's ode "Intimations of Immortality", which describes the "'bright landscape' of childhood that casts its spell over later life".

[34] Olivero's quest for the source of the stream has been described as "travelling allegorically across a landscape of the mind", moving him "from the boundaries of the preconscious to the center of the id".

[39] The novel's development of the "clearly autobiographical hero"[40] of Olivero owes a great deal to Read's wartime experiences and the "resolute self-possession" they instilled in him.

"[42] The son of a farmer, Read was born at Muscoates Grange, about four miles (6.4 km) south of the small North Yorkshire market town of Kirkbymoorside, to which he returned in 1949.

[44] In the words of historian David Goodway, Read's "remarkable career and formidable output have generated a surprisingly limited biographical and critical literature".

[45] Richard Wasson has commented that The Green Child "though judged favorably by the few critics and scholars who give it serious study ... is so vaguely and variously interpreted that it would seem to lack both the form and the content which justify such praise".

[46] A review published in The Times shortly after the book's publication described it as a "very charming philosophical tale",[47] and in his paper the historian and lecturer Bob Barker praised the novel for being "remarkable for its cool yet vivid style".

[1] Critic Orville Prescott, writing in The New York Times, although admitting that the novel was "beautifully written" and "a triumph of delicate and suggestive mystification", nevertheless concluded that the story was "ridiculous" and "vexatious".