The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Jobber Skald (also published as Weymouth Sands, 1935) and Maiden Castle (1937) — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language. Even those who do not feel ready for the 1,000-page novel based on Arthurian Britain, Porius (1951) which some consider to be the master work, it should be clear that here we have a truly major figure.
Every now and again there is an attempt at a revival. A brave publisher will reissue one of the novels and print on the jacket the plaudits which Powys has received: ‘The only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’, wrote George Steiner. ‘To encounter Powys’ (Henry Miller this time) ‘is to arrive at the very fount of creation’.
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