| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9781585671151 | | Publisher: Overlook Press | | Publish Date: 2/1/2001 | | Buy.com Sku: 30677861 | | Item#: RFL9LG | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.5H x 6.5L x 1.75T | | Pages: 608 |
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| | | | The novels of John Cowper Powys are like none other, containing the romantic extravagance and comic exuberance of the great nineteenth-century novels with the self-conscious depth and introspection of the great Modernists. Maiden Castle portrays in pointillist detail the complexities of sexual and romantic feeling that bedevil an eccentric cast of characters, and explores the psychological idiosyncrasies that fuel their hopes and dreams, fantasies and failures. At the center of the novel is the aptly named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart. Their awkward yet endearing efforts to create a life together unfold in counterpoint to the romantic and familial relationships that sizzle and simmer in the village of Dorchester. Yet even as the characters in Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith -- readjusting their sights and affections -- it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives.
Annotation:
In John Cowper Powys's vast novel, a historical novelist with the improbable but exactly descriptive name of Dud Noman is mourning the death of the wife he adored but who rejected him. Now, a year later, an itinerant circus performer named Wizzie enters his life. As they try to accommodate each other into their very different worlds, the mysterious Maiden Castle looms over the village where they live, and seems to exert an effect on what goes on there as well.
| PraiseKirkus
"A grandiose, preternaturally intuitive, frequently absurd, stunningly inventive novel, which, for all its resemblance to Dickens as well as Hardy, is unquestionably the work of an underrated and genuinely great writer." 02/15/2001 |
| Author Bio| John Cowper Powys | | Powys was one of 10 children, of whom six became writers. Born in Derbyshire, he began a lecture tour in America when he was in his early 30s, eventually settling on a farm in Upstate New York with Phyllis Playter, a woman he met at one of his lectures in Joplin, Missouri. Powys's affinities, however, were always with Wales, home of his ancestors, and he moved there with his companion in 1935, living in the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog until his death, at 91. Powys wrote all his life--a torrent of words that yielded several books that are considered eccentric masterpieces. His most acclaimed novel, WOLF SOLENT (1929), concerns a history teacher who gives up his London life to search out the past of his ancestral village in Dorsetshire. |
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