Wolf Solent (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1929; From The Ground Up Collected Papers Of A. R. Powys by A.R. Powy. London: Dent, 1937. All the same, despite his indebtedness to the Victorian novel and his enthusiasm for Hardy, Walter Scott and such lesser figures as Ainsworth, Powys was clearly a modernist. [46] He has affinities also with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Pater, Marcel Proust, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson. [47] Maiden Castle, Dorset hill fort has an important role in Powys's novel Maiden Castle Proteus and the Magician: The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Henry Miller, ed. Jacqueline Peltier (2014)

But let’s ask why, in a more fundamental sense. Surely our first impression after seeing this should be of deep bewilderment. There is the eros in Wolf Solent, in A Glastonbury Romance, in Weymouth Sands, which goes far beyond anything in Lawrence, in its exploratory frankness, in its genius, in its candour, in its sheer courage to explore almost every ramification of human sexuality. So the argument might go: why hasn't John Cowper Powys profited enormously from what is called the new liberation?

Bibliography

John Cowper Powys, "Introduction to the English edition", A Philosophy of Solitude. London: Jonathan Cape, 1933, p. 7. Jones, Ben, ″The disfigurement of Gerda: Moral and Textual Problems in Wolf Solent″, The Powys Review 2, Winter 1977, pp.20–27. < https://www.powys-society.org/1PDF/PR_02.pdf>. Accessed 8 August 2021. One of Powys's most important works, his Autobiography (1934), describes his first 60 years. While he sets out to be totally frank about himself, and especially his sexual peculiarities and perversions, he largely excludes any substantial discussion of the women in his life. [89] The reason for this is now much clearer because we now know that it was written while he was still married to Margaret, though he was living in a permanent relationship with Phyllis Playter.

See Powys's Autobiography (1967) pp. 35 and 414; C. A Coates, pp. 151–153 and especially pp. 165–169. Powys to the Trovillions: The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Hal W. and Violet Trovillion, ed. Paul Roberts, intr. Kenneth Hopkins (1990) The face on the Waterloo steps [ edit ] Victory Arch, Waterloo station's main entrance, where Wolf Solent had seen the look of "inert despair" on a man's face. The arch was a memorial to the dead of World War I. [59]Often described as one of the greatest English novels of the twentieth century, John Cowper Powys’s epic Wolf Solent centres around the story of a young man returning to his roots in the West Country after ten years in London. Compelling, romantic and sensuous, it is peopled with memorable characters and filled with vivid, primitive descriptions of landscape. But beyond this powerful evocation of people and place, Wolf Solent is also a meditation on life and death, good and evil, body and soul, combining the earthy and everyday with the spiritual’. — Penguin Classics cover Numerous books, etc. by, or about Powys, can be read online at "John Cowper Powys" Internet Archive Novels [ edit ] Diane Fernandez But what would the biography say about the Welsh years? What can one say about thirty years in North Wales? Wolf at the end faces the loss of his "mythology" and questions how human beings can "go on living, when their live-illusion was destroyed". [36] Suicide seems a possibility, but the novel ends with Wolf having "a kind of vision" involving a field of golden buttercups, and realizing "that traditional morality" the kind his "mythology" operated under "is too simple". [37] "Powys's vision is not tragic but essentially comic-grotesque". [38] The final words of Wolf Solent — "Well, I shall have a cup of tea" — have been described by Peter Easingwood as "notoriously bathetic". [39] According to Robert Timlin however, "Once its significance in the context of the book as a whole is understood, for Powys to end with Wolf planning to have a cup of tea can be regarded as neither an example of bathos nor an arbitrary decision but an entirely appropriate finish. A light touch, yes, but hardly without resonance." [40] Main characters [ edit ] The River Yeo at Bradford Abbas. In a letter in 1925 Powys refers to the setting of Wolf Solent: "It won't really be Bradford Abbas nor will Yeovil be Yeovil or Sherborne Sherborne, but it will be my idea of those places". The River Yeo (Lunt in the novel) runs through all these places. [41]