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Chris Thomas' second article in this issue quotes a number of such eulogistic accounts of JCP's lectures in the 1910s, focusing in particular on Alexander Kaun's review of the lecture on Oscar Wilde delivered at the Little Theatre in Chicago in January 1915; and his third piece reproduces, with extensive commentary and annotation, Powys' 1923 introduction to Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Dr Beddow combines close-reading with a wide range of cultural reference to reflect on what Powys is doing with language in Wolf Solent, and on how a full appreciation of the writer's narrative technique in a section of the novel like the 'Gerda' chapter depends on a readerly alertness to 'dissonant voices, jarring stylistic juxtapositions' and the lurching between 'high and low registers', which can account for the unnerving sense we have of this as a novel not quite late-Victorian nor yet High Modernist, but generically restless, shifting, disruptive. [...]Volume XXXII contains an Editorial Note on a point of clarification regarding the scripts of John Cowpers and Llewelyn's lectures; and reviews of four recent publications of relevance to the Powyses.

After writing about a chapter of A Glastonbury Romance.1 Wolf Solent became my next project, largely because a book so weirdly compelling would not go to sleep in my mind until I had found some way of disinterring the source of its energy. Tire diffuse style of John Cowper Powys does not lend itself to pithy summary, as his own comments confirm: I regard the book as a sort of river ... the waters of which you like to bathe in if you like that kind of water but which you leave, drawing up your canoe, at a great psychic curve of the stream where the 'murmurs and scents'of the sea arc most vivid... .'4 'An Irresistible Long-winded Bore' is the title of one critically appreciative article;5 even more forthright is another generally approving piece which takes no prisoners in its opening salvo: 'By his own admission, John Cowper Powys was mentally abnormal'6. For whilst we might enjoy the evident rhythms of seasonal change and growth that pervade much or the writing (and Powys rivals D.H. Lawrence for the loving exactitude of his botanical descriptions), we should nevertheless also be alert to dissonant voices, jarring stylistic juxtapositions and violent carnal revulsion, observed but never described - in for example the decomposing face of the young teacher Redfern, alluded to constantly in a virtuoso sequence of images around that four-letter word which occurs twenty-three times in this chapter and nearly five hundred times in the novel as a whole, in its meanings as both countenance and a watch- or clock-race (the countenance of Time). Bodies and heads, living and dead, clamour tor our attention in Wolf Solent, be they Miss Gault's 'upper lip, which projected from her face very much as certain fungi project from the brown bark of a dead tree' (p. 27), Squire Urquhart's 'protuberant belly like Punch' (p. 47) or 'the fleshless head of William Solent' (p. 85).

'Faced with an increasing reliance on automatic spell-checkers or the attitude that, in the scheme of things, typographic errors don't much matter, those of us who are manically pernickety may hang our heads in despair.' [...]wrote Frank Key, the pseudonym of the English writer Paul Byrne (1959-2019), in a blog in February 2014 entitled 'The Art of Amateur Proofreading'. [...]in the time before the computer and the automatic spell-checkers, book-editing and proof-reading were also not necessarily faultless. Feipel also kept carbon copies of his own letters to them, correspondence with their publishers, and secondary correspondence with Lloyd Emerson Siberell (1905-1968), JCP's first bibliographer; Agnes de Lima (1887-1974), a friend of Llewelyn's wife Alyse Gregory, who wrote to him, when in 1940 Alyse was assembling letters from Llewelyn for a collection; and Edith Jardine, who, while typing them out, found Llewelyn's handwriting often as difficult to decipher as I did. The setting is Feipel's kitchen, which had the best lighting and writing-table for his proofreading activities, lacking the dated Victorian drapery of the rest of the house (312 11th St., Brooklyn, New York).

Introducing one of the grimmest chapters in what is surely one of his most unrelentingly grim novels, The Market Bell, he referred disparagingly to the 'too highly scented' novels of his day, advising a 'modest author' such as himself 'to hold his nose while passing through them'.4 It is doubtful whether Powys ever seriously contemplated competing with contemporary popular fiction; he wrote from an insatiable need to explore his own spiritual condition, and to do this he chose not to look beyond the East Dorset landscape and communities around East Chaldon, where he lived from 1902 to 1940. ' 'Francois Marie Arouet never knew, when he said that', observed Mr. Dibben to his friend, Dean Ashbourne, 'that in 1920 I, David Dibben, should be called by the Holy Spirit, to Child Madder.'6 Powys clearly here intends to establish a sophisticated authorial voice comparable to that of Hardy in his satirical account of Dibben's pretentious intellectualism. [...]the plough had turned over the little house, and the mouse became an infidel.8 Appreciating what Powys was reading, however, is only a first step towards an explanation for the direction that his own fiction took; we need also to consider what influenced the way he was led to interpret the eclectic range of books he references throughout his writing. [...]by praying, as it were, to the wind or to the sea, to the fire or to the smoke, the element, being by its pristine innocence nearer to the magic circle than man, could carry the prayer up to the higher regions of the immortal Godhead.

Down in his study every morning at seven-thirty he would deal with his letters; family prayers at eight; breakfast immediately afterwards; then a brief space taken up in wandering round the garden; then work in his study at his sermons or correspondence; then to the school or the village or sometimes work in the garden; dinner at one-thirty; at two-thirty he invariably set out to visit the sick in the parish, or those who needed help in any way; back home again by five-forty-five; tea at six o' clock; then often to some meeting in the village; supper at nine and bed at ten o' clock.1 As J. Lawrence Mitchell has noted in his unconventional but informative biography of T.F. Powys, none of the six Powys boys was to be ordained; like most of his siblings, Theodore reacted against his clerical upbringing.2 Of Theodore it has been said that neither his God nor his Christ is that of the orthodox Christian. When Mr Bromby 'began to preach about hell fire and the punishment of the wicked' (142/172) young John Lark is driven mad. [...]we see what is achieved by seeking attention in the hope of gaining preferment: 'And so Mr Bromby had made his mark; madness upon the one hand, and a horrid blot upon the other'(MS, 144/175). Since my lord commanded me to turn the Huddys into the road, I have been unable to give to him that proper honour which St Peter tells us to render to those in authority above us. The narrator confirms that James 'spoke the truth. Since the day of his christening, Mrs Andrews had looked with a kind of shame at her eldest son ... she grew more than ever inclined to treat him as a wrong one, not in name only but in nature' (MO, 16).

According to Ghosh, this linear \"conception of time (which has much in common with both Protestant and secular teleologies, like those of Hegel and Marx)\" aligns itself with \"the avant-garde as it hurtles forward in its impatience to erase every archaic reminder of Man's kinship with the nonhuman\" (70). According to J. S. Udal in an 1892 essay on \"Witchcraft in Dorset,\" \"There is no part of England … more prone to belief in the supernatural … than the West; and, of the western counties, none more so than Dorset\" where \"the belief in witchcraft still ekes out a flickering existence\" (quoted in Radford, Mapping, 19). According to J. Lawrence Mitchell's biography, \"One facet of TFP's private universe is revealed in the remarkable persistence of a group of related images in his work: images of field and farm, of earth and clay. According to Ghosh, \"the real mystery in relation to the agency of nonhumans lies not in the renewed recognition of it, but rather in how this awareness came to be suppressed in the first place, at least within the modes of thought and expression that have become dominant over the last couple of centuries.

A reissue of an amusing 1931 work by this British author that describes the strange doings among rural villagers and how they're affected by the arrival of an outsider.

In this book, Frances Bingham tells the absorbing life-story of a woman of intense sexual and poetic passion who had many love Valentine Ackland: affairs, mainly with women, and who from A Transgressive Life childhood was dedicated to the idea of herself as a poet. [...]we read here of their initial commitment to the Communist Party and their support of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, and of their involvement in British politics, especially with regard to rural poverty, about which Ackland published a book, Country Conditions, in 1936. Bingham observes that 'the Powys faction in the village was deeply disapproving' of Valentine and Sylvia's marriage '(with the exception of Llewelyn, who wanted Valentine to supply details)'.

To challenge this critical consensus Jamoussi proposes the works of William Golding, notably The Lord of the Flies, in which he finds a number of parallels that may not be coincidental: for Jamoussi the influence is 'indubitable'. The publication of Jamoussi's book reminds us of the considerable attention that T.F. Powys has received in France, and, sadly, of how in Britain the praise of critics as eminent as William Empson and F.R. Leavis has left hardly a mark on later generations of critics - with the distinguished exception of John Gray. Recently he has been working on the Codex argenteus, the 'Silver Bible' in the Gothic language, now preserved at the library of Uppsala University.