Maiden Castle
(amazon)John Cowper Powys (View Bio)
Hardcover: The Overlook Press, 2001.
Maiden Castle is the last of John Cowper Powys's Dorset or "Wessex" novels. It is the story of men and women who have lost their first love and first faith, and of their struggle to readjust and to reach "the life behind the life."
“Powys is by turns an Emily Bronte, a wild creature of the health; a subtle, introspective Proust; a nature-enthralled Wordsworth; a Poe, journeying in deliberate search of horror; a Dostoyevsky, shaking with the mystic fever; even at rare moments, a Shakespeare hurling the ultimate dramatic word!”—Ernest Sutherland Bates, Saturday Review of Literature
“[Powys] is still ‘the master’ to me. His words, even today, have the power of bewitching me.”—Henry Miller
“Filled with authentic characters and closely caught conversations, [Powys’s books] resemble Shakespeare in the interplay of cultured and ignorant, male and female.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“John Cowper Powys is a powerful genius, whose novels stir us deeply.”—Annie Dillard
“Powys can be read with an absorption which one by no means experiences every day.” —The Nation
“Thousands of baby boom readers who grew up with Tolkien now want to spend their adulthood with the chronicles of Powys.”—The Independent
"His sense of encompassing nature and the living ever-present past, his power to convey curious states of mind, the beauty of his best writing, the exciting, erotic and cosmic scenes with which he alleviates his cosmic conceptions, could only come from a man possessed of superlative talent, genius, or (the word is inescapable with Powys) daemon." — Times Literary Supplement