Wolf Solent (Penguin Modern Classics)

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C. A. Coates. John Cowper Powys in Search of a Landscape. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Nonle, 1982, p. 90. a b Taylor, Felix (2019). "John Cowper Powys and the Anti-vivisection Movement". The Powys Journal. 29: 57–76. JSTOR 26748057.

Gwyneth F. Miles, "The Pattern of Homecoming", in Essays of John Cowper Powys, ed. Belinda Humfrey. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1972, p. 221. More minor in scale, the novels that followed Porius are marked by elements of fantasy. The Inmates (1952) is set in a madhouse and explores Powys's interest in mental illness, but it is a work on which Powys failed to bestow sufficient "time and care". [85] Glen Cavaliero, in John Cowper Powys: Novelist, describes the novels written after Porius as "the spontaneous fairy tales of a Rabelaisian surrealist enchanted with life", and finds Atlantis (1954) "the richest and most sustained" of them. [86] Atlantis is set in the Homeric world. The protagonist is Nisos, the young son of Odysseus, who plans to voyage west from Ithaca over the drowned Atlantis. [87] Powys final fiction, such as Up and Out (1957) and All or Nothing (1960) "use the mode of science fiction, although science has no part in them". [88] Non-fiction [ edit ] Autobiographical [ edit ] H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Thomas Knight, To Hell with Culture: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature. University of Wales Press, 2005. ISBN 0708318983. p. 127.I want in selfish delight to end by looking at two passages in which John Cowper Powys’s genius is such, and of so immediate a quality that one would want to read them from the rooftops: the kind of passages where everything I've said fades into total insignificance, and one is just left with the desperate question, “why does anybody need convincing?” This mythical masterpiece ... There is comedy, Miltonic sublimity, chaos and confusion in equal measure ... Before Wolf Solent there had been four earlier apprentice novels: Wood and Stone (1915), Rodmoor (1916), the posthumous After my Fashion (1980), which was written around 1920, and Ducdame (1925). [41] Wolf Solent was the first of the so-called Wessex novels, which include A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934) and Maiden Castle (1936). [42] Powys was an admirer of Thomas Hardy, and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset, parts of Hardy's mythical Wessex. [43] The American scholar Richard Maxwell described these four novels "as remarkably successful with the reading public of his time". [44] Maiden Castle, the last of the Wessex novels, is set in Dorchester, Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge. Powys intended it to be a rival of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. [45]

Porius is set mainly in Corwen. The events take place in the week of "October 18, to October 25, A.D. 499", during a historical period when, Powys claims, "There appears to be an absolute blank, as far as documentary evidence goes, with regard to the history of Britain". [69] This was in fact a time of major transition in the history of Britain, with the replacing of Roman traditions with Saxon rule and the conversion of the British to Christianity. [70] There are again, as with Owen Glendower, parallels with contemporary history: "The Dark Ages and the 1930s are the periods of what Powys, in Yeatsian phrase calls 'appalling transition'." [71] and there was a clear possibility of another "Saxon" invasion, when Powys began writing Porius in 1942. [72] In prefatory comments probably written about 1949, as the Cold War began, Powys suggests: One of the few benefits of anxiety is the creation of fictional worlds or alarming perspectives wherein writers can indulge and play out their fears.” Richard Dudley Ryder, Animal revolution: changing attitudes toward speciesism. Berg Publishers, 2000, p. 269.John Cowper Powys's two younger brothers Llewelyn Powys (1884–1939) and Theodore Francis Powys were well-known writers, while his sister Philippa Powys published a novel and some poetry. Another sister Marian Powys was an authority on lace and lace-making and published a book on this subject. [5] His brother A. R. Powys was Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and published a number of books on architectural subjects. [6] Powys was educated at Sherborne School and graduated from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, June 1894. [7] Derek Langridge, John Cowper Powys: A Record of Achievement. London: The Library Association, 1966, pp. 115, 121 and Taylor, Kevin, 'Editorial' and 'Missing the Middle' in Wolf Solent the Six Deleted Chapters, The Powys Journal Volume XXXI Supplement, 2021, pp.7–29. Selena Gault: is an "eccentric ugly woman who is spiritual mother to Wolf", and who had probably been his father's lover. [50] The book stuns through its complete plausibility from a historical angle and the prism of the seven-year-old’s youthful but (unsurprisingly) intelligent perspective. Years after reading it, the broad sweep of the book lingers in my mind as a cautionary tale, as if this was some almost-true alley of history we narrowly avoided.