Wolf Solent (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Moving from Derbyshire to Dorset, the growing family soon settled in Somerset, in the vicarage at Montacute, one of the most beautiful and historic villages in England. This was a setting of exceptional natural and architectural beauty. Here the Powyses pursued a life of comfortable upper-middle-class eccentricity, of botanising and sermonising and antiquarian research. The Powyses were not rich, but they were well born, and had some private means. Mrs Powys claimed literary ancestry, through the poets Donne and Cowper, and was said to have inherited Cowper's melancholia. Your next choice is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which leads me to think women aren’t faring too well on your list. Here was a reading of the long paragraph in the chapter “Consummation", in A Glastonbury Romance (London. 1933, p.317) which begins' “ This was the moment, as she felt herself pulled across the room by her wrist, that she knew her first real spasm of fear of her man”. and ends. “The extremity of her sensation that sensation which Tiresias (to his own disaster!) had placed above the man's implied a vivid consciousness that she, Nell, was being possessed by him, Sam.”] Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, in 1872, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys (1843–1923), and Mary Cowper Johnson, granddaughter of Dr John Johnson, the cousin and close friend of the poet William Cowper. [3] He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also talented. The family lived in Shirley between 1871 and 1879, briefly in Dorchester, Dorset and then they moved to Montacute, Somerset, where Charles Powys was vicar for thirty-two years. [4]

Lane, Denis, ed. In the Spirit of Powys: New Essays. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990, pp.43–70.The Dorset Year: The Diary of John Cowper Powys, 1934-1935, ed. Morine Krissdóttir and Roger Peers (1998)

Wolf may have retreated to Dorset, and to his own inner world once there, but life is far from comforting, straightforward or serene. A review when Wolf Solent was published described it as “one of the great apocalyptic novels of our time”.In May 1955 they moved, for the last time, to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. John Cowper Powys died in 1963 and Phyllis Playter in 1982. [30] Blaenau Ffestiniog, where Powys lived from 1955 until he died in 1963 Works [ edit ] Poetry [ edit ]