Synopsis
In the remote Dorset village of East Chaldon, T.F. POWYS (1875-1953) wrote a steady succession of novels, novellas, fables and short stories which first appeared in print during the 1920s and early 1930s. These tales of startling originality and strange beauty offer wry observations on the human condition, the enigma of God, and arresting insights into the nature of good and evil, infused with subtle and dark humour of the rarest vintage. In this, the author's final masterpiece, John Death arrives in the obscure Dorset village of Little Dodder with instructions to unclay two of its inhabitants. Unfortunately for him, Death loses the divine parchment bearing the names of the doomed pair, and is obliged to stay in Little Dodder until he finds it. And in the course of that summer he acquires a taste for life... This new edition, prefaced by a thought-provoking introduction by John Gray, is the novel's first appearance in paperback.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Theodore Francis Powys was born in 1875 at Shirley in Derbyshire, one of the eleven children of the Rev. Charles Powys, an Anglican clergyman of evan¬gelical views. His family was predominantly Welsh but was also related to Donne and Cowper. T. F. Powys, unlike his elder brothers John Cowper and Llewelyn, did not go to Cambridge. Instead, for a short time, he farmed in Suffolk. Then, in 1901, he settled in a labourer's cottage at Studland on the Dorset coast, to live a life of contempla¬tion on his father's allowance of £60 a year. In 1904 he moved to East Chaldon, also in Dorset, and in 1905 married Violet Rosalie Dodds. They had two sons, one of whom died in Kenya. Powys's first book was An Interpretation of Genesis, begun in 1904 and privately printed in 1908. In this he made use of the dialogue form, but it was only in 1916 that he turned to fiction, with Mr Tasker's Gods, an essay in realism published in 1925. In 1917 he wrote Black Bryony, published in 1923. He first became known as a writer with The Left Leg, a collection of three stories, in which his gift for the extended fable begins to emerge. This 'was followed by Mark Only (1924), Mockery Gap (1925) and Innocent Birds (1926). In 1927 came his best-known masterpiece, Mr Weston's Good Wine, an allegory of good and evil in which Mr Weston figures as both wine-merchant and God. Another important book was Fables (1929), largely consisting of dialogues between common¬place objects, and animals. Kindness in a Corner was published in 1930, and in 1931 came The Only Penitent and the last full-length novel, UNCLAY. Throughout this period Powys was also writing short stories, four collections of which were later published. A com¬prehensive selection of them is to be found in God's Eyes A' Twinkle (1947). The same countryside, the same characters, recur from book to book. Within this context operates that startling awareness of men's actions and beliefs which, with his mastery of the humorous understatement and his great originality, marks all T. F. Powys's fiction. In 1940, with his writing career behind him, Powys moved to the quite village of Mappowder in North Dorset where he died in 1953.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
