STILL BLUE BEAUTY Wessex Essays of Llewelyn Powys

Twenty-six Essays

A paperback of

176 pages

Price £ 9.99

ISBN-13: 9780955152375

Dimensions: 210x140mm

Published: June 2008 

Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939) spent much of his adult life in exile from his native Wessex, residing at various times – for reasons of work or health – in Africa, America and Switzerland, as well as travelling in Europe, Palestine and the West Indies. These often enforced absences served to intensify his love of the landscape and lore of Somerset and Dorset, where he had grown up during the latter years of Queen Victoria’s reign, and brought to the numerous essays he later wrote about the Wessex region a powerful sense of identification and nostalgia, an almost tangible longing to recapture the happy days of his childhood and to rediscover the people and places of his home country.

In Durdle Door to Dartmoor The Sundial Press brought together twenty-six of Powys’s finest Wessex essays, and now gathers twenty-six more for this new companion volume, Still Blue Beauty. Like those in the earlier collection, they are richly evocative of West Country places and landscape, but have a greater focus on people of the region, or those who were famously associated with it – from historical characters such as King Alfred or the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth, to later contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Powys’s own Dorchester neighbours and remembered friends of his Montacute childhood. Members of Powys’s remarkable family feature too – his father, the Rev. Charles Powys, Vicar of Montacute for thirty-three years; his novelist brothers John Cowper Powys and T. F. Powys; his artist sister Gertrude; Littleton Powys, who became headmaster of Sherborne Prep; and his younger brother William, with whom he spent four years farming in Africa.

CONTENTS:  The Sea! The Sea! The Sea! - Lodmoor - The Memory of One Day - A Stonehenge in Miniature - The Father of Dorset - A Pond - High Chaldon - A Royal Rebel - Somerset Names - Montacute Hill - The Village Shop - The Wordsworths in Dorset - The World Is New! - A Visit by Moonlight - Shaftesbury: Champion of the Poor - A Wish for Freedom - Athelney: In the Steps of King Alfred - Wookey Hole - Green Corners of Dorset - Recollections of Thomas Hardy - A Foolish Razorbill - A Richer Treasure - Weymouth Memories - The Shambles Fog-Horn - Dorchester Lives

To read A Pond one of Llewelyn Powys's finest essays please click on the following link A Pond which will open in a new window.

To read one of the previously uncollected essays from this new selection please click on the following link The World Is New! which will open in a new window.

STILL BLUE BEAUTY

Wessex Essays of

Llewelyn Powys

Softback £9.99

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August 2008