A Bright Green Field and Other Stories was published by Peter Owen in London in 1958. The collection occupies a middle position in Kavan’s bibliography — after the breakthrough of Asylum Piece (1940) and Sleep Has His House (1948) but before the full realization of Ice (1967) — and it shows Kavan working in multiple modes simultaneously.
Some stories are relatively conventional: recognizable characters in recognizable settings, dealing with loneliness, failed relationships, and the small cruelties of social life. Others are fully surrealist: the title story describes a landscape — a bright green field — that may be real, may be remembered, may be imagined, and whose significance shifts with each paragraph. The field is beautiful, serene, and somehow threatening; it promises peace and delivers unease; it is the kind of Kavan landscape that exists in the space between perception and hallucination.
The collection’s best pieces achieve a compression that anticipates the distilled intensity of Kavan’s final work. She can render an entire emotional situation — a lifetime of disappointment, a moment of terror, the slow realization that you are not the person you thought you were — in a few pages, using images rather than arguments, silences rather than explanations.
Collecting A Bright Green Field
First edition (Peter Owen, London, 1958): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good: $60–$150