More virtuoso performance than novel, Blindness remains beguiling for its prefiguration of the major themes and techniques of Green's mature fiction: the exact rightness of the conversation of both landed gentry and servants, the machinations of people at cross-purposes, symbolism in nature and names, the young and old locked together in death-grip relations, and much humor and sadness. Significantly, the last sections of the novel are called "Finishing" and "Beginning Again"—participles that look forward to the titles of Green's later works….

[Green] learned to write by listening to the workers around him [in his father's factory]: "Unlike literary men, factory workers are interested, passionately interested, in one subject above all—the lives and habits of other people. Get into conversation with any group of workmen—and other people is what they talk about."

In 1929 Green published Living, a novel very much about people. Like the other "ing...