LLEWELYN
POWYS
Llewelyn
Powys (1884 – 1939) was born in Dorchester, Dorset. A year later the family moved to the village of Montacute in Somerset where his father, the Rev. Charles Francis Powys, became rector and remained so for thirty three years. Powys was educated at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then spent several years in Switzerland, Africa and the USA where he eventually established his career as a writer. While living in New York he met and married the novelist, Alyse
Gregory, who was managing editor of the prestigious Dial
magazine. In 1925 the couple moved to Dorset: firstly to the Coastguard Cottages on White Nore and then a short distance to Chydyok; an isolated farmhouse where his two sisters, the poet and novelist, Philippa
Powys, and the artist, Gertrude Powys, occupied the adjacent cottage. A couple of miles to the south lay the valley village of East Chaldon where his brother, Theodore Powys, the author of novels, stories and fables, lived as well as the writers Sylvia Townsend Warner and David
Garnett, the poets Valentine Ackland and Gamel Woolsey, and the sculptors Elizabeth Muntz and Stephen Tomlin, at varying times. As his health steadily deteriorated Llewelyn moved to Switzerland in 1936 where he continued to write essays and completed an imaginary autpbiography Love and Death.
Llewelyn
Powys is one of the rare writers who teach endurance of life as well as
its
enjoyment. Philip Larkin
For those
with wit to heed his calls to observe and consider, the rewards of
reading
Powys are apparent … He is a writer of often exquisite
perception. The Times Literary Supplement
It is
Llewelyn Powys’s distinction of attitude, style and personality that
makes his
writing remarkable. Peter J. Foss (bibliographer)
When
Llewelyn Powys puts pen to paper, something miraculous happens with
words. The New York Herald Tribune
Civilisation needs men
like Llewelyn Powys,
such men who combine the austerity of a saint with the zest of a pagan. Ethel
Mannin
DURDLE
DOOR TO DARTMOOR
Wessex
Essays of Llewelyn Powys
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CONTENTS:
The Durdle Door – The
White Nose – A Bronze Age Valley – Bats Head -The Fossil Forest – The
Castle
Park of East Lulworth – St Aldhelm’s Head – Studland – Corfe Castle –
Herring
Gulls – Stalbridge Rectory – The River Yeo – Cerne Abbas –
Stinsford
Churchyard – The Grave of William Barnes – Weymouth Harbour –
Portland – A Famous Wreck – Hardy’s Monument –
The Swannery Bell at
Abbotsbury – Lyme Regis – Montacute House – Ham Hill – On the Other
Side of the
Quantocks – Exmoor –
Dartmoor
ISBN-13:
9780955152344
Paperback
at
£9.99
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“It brings
together
twenty-six of his best essays in a paperback volume, the cover adorned
with a
striking painting by local artist Nicholas Hely Hutchinson of the
Dorset cliff
path — a path on which still stands the memorial stone to Llewelyn
Powys
carved by the sculptress Elizabeth Muntz. The arrangement of the essays
suggests a sort of tour of Wessex, covering as they do a wide
range of places
and topics, from Corfe Castle to Lyme Regis, from Cerne Abbas to
Studland. But
this is no mere tourist handbook, rather an ideal companion to one.
Powys was a
wonderfully observant writer, whether contemplating the delicate
imprints of
deer hooves in the parklands of Sherborne or aerial battles between
ravens and falcons,
or recalling the “pantaloon trousers” of his grandfather at Stalbridge
Rectory carrying
primroses for his wife or the “round shining belly” of a kitchen kettle
that
Thomas Hardy said was his earliest memory.” From the first
review of DURDLE DOOR TO DARTMOOR which appeared in The Blackmore Vale
Magazine. You can read a PDF file of the full review here
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DURDLE
DOOR TO DARTMOOR
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WITHIN UK DELIVERY
£9.99 |
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ROW
DELIVERY
£12.99 |
23 February 2021
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NOW IN STOCK
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STILL
BLUE BEAUTY
Wessex
Essays of Llewelyn Powys
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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
(includes
four previously uncollected essays)
ISBN-13:
9780955152375
in
paperback at £9.99
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The essays in this volume were
written in the
1930s and were first published in a wide variety of journals, from
broadsheets such
as the Manchester Guardian, Dorset Daily Echo, and Western
Gazette and the popular
magazines Country Life and the Atlantic Monthly, to literary journals
such as the Adelphi and the Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as
other
more obscure publications such as the Weymouth
and District Hospital Carnival Programme.
But wherever his
work appeared – and Powys
was refreshingly unsnobbish about his reputation in this regard – he
wrote for
the same reader and with the same confidant intimacy of a personal
friend,
appealing to the native common sense and natural goodness of ordinary
people,
and asking only that they take the time to observe and contemplate
during their
own earthly sojourn.
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SOLD OUT but Reprinting! (December 2021)
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A REVIEW
OF
Christmas Lore
& Legend: Yuletide
Essays by
Llewelyn Powys
Christmas Lore & Legend is a
collection of fourteen previously
uncollected
`Yuletide Essays’ by Llewelyn Powys, although five of them have
previously been
published in books which include `A Baker’s Dozen (2)’;
`Dorset
Essays’(2); `The Twelve Months’ and
Kenneth Hopkins’ `Llewelyn
Powys – A Selection from His Writings’ The remaining nine
essays were
previously published in newspapers and magazines during the 1930s, with
about
half of them being written in Switzerland during the final three years
of
Llewelyn’s life, and they are collected here in book form for the first
time.
This is the third book of `collected essays’
from the
Sundial Press by this author, following `Durdle Door to Dartmoor’ and
its
companion volume, `Still Blue Beauty’, and the publishers are to be
congratulated, for as all devotees of Llewelyn Powys know, apart from
`Wessex
Memories’ (2002) and Cecil Woolf’s `Powys Heritage Series’ of diary
publications selected & edited by the excellent Peter Foss, in
recent years
any previously unpublished Llewelyn Powys material has been – and
remains – as
rare as frog’s feathers!
Of course it is regrettable and little
disappointing
to those who collect his work that any new title with Llewelyn Powys
named as
author should contain any previously published
material at all, yet
considering that it’s seventy one years since his death, it’s almost
inevitable
that this should be the case as the volume of his work — especially
that which
constitutes publishable material — becomes exhausted. Perhaps then, we
should
be thankful for small mercies and welcome this latest publication into
the
canon of his books, remembering that it could also be an introduction
to the
author for someone who is only initially interested in the lore and
legend of
Christmas! For even if the author’s name meant nothing, the startlingly
attractive cover alone would most certainly catch the interest and
attention of
such a person, for it bears all the festive hallmarks of the 1930’s
period
Christmas with the ubiquitous Robin and sprigs of holly against a merry
red
background, and looks for all the world like the fattest Christmas card
you
ever saw. Dare I hint that it would make an ideal Christmas gift?
The book benefits from an intuitively written
and
extremely perceptive foreword by Anthony Head, whose brilliant
summation of
this collection of essays can neither be gainsaid nor surpassed when he
writes:
Rich in imagery
and anecdote, woven through
with local lore and personal
reminiscence, these Yuletide essays bring vividly alive the customs and
character, the sounds and tastes of earlier generations and are
informed by the
lively curiosity and deep nostalgia that typify Powys’ best work.
`Rich in imagery and anecdote’ is true of all
his
work, but oft repeated anecdote constitutes a blemish on an otherwise
flawless
page, and there are blemishes here which include the repetition of both
anecdote and phrase in several of the essays. Of content and style they
represent a mixed bag, with the author’s virtues and faults paraded
together; well-balanced
lyrical sentences marred by the use of an obscure word or phrase, one
or two
mixed metaphors, the striving for effect with an over-indulgence in
exclamation
marks…!
Equally, those who are familiar with Llewelyn’s
best
work will recognize instances where his normally unique style becomes
affected
– doubtless influenced by writing for a specific readership, but
nevertheless
disconcerting; and given his avowed and much vaunted pagan rationalism,
some of
these `affectations’ are incommiscible. And whilst some may feel that
two or
three of the essays lack the quality of construction and crystal clear
coherence normally associated with Llewelyn, others may be bemused by
comments
which would seem to indicate the author’s tacit acceptance of some of
the
tenets of Christianity.
Criticism apart, some of Llewelyn’s finest work
is
also represented here, perhaps nowhere more so than in the very first
essay,
`The First Fall of Snow’ when, reminiscing about his time in Africa, he
writes:
I have felt the
earth, our ancient Mother Earth
beneath my feet, tremble
and quiver in an ecstasy of childbirth under the sweet persuasion of
those
torrential down-pourings; but never once did she attain to such
mysterious
power as when, at rest under a covering of snow, she lies with the
appearance
and potency of a sepultured goddess who is in truth dead and yet
retains that
upon her ivory forehead which is equivalent to immortality.
Neil Lee Atkin (The Powys Society Newsletter)
Llewelyn
Powys and Christmas shopping in
Dorchester
 Jo
Draper takes a
walk through yesteryear’s Dorchester as seen through the enthusiastic
eyes of
Llewelyn Powys and traders’ adverts through the ages
Llewelyn
Powys loved Dorchester, and even
thought it best in winter, rejoicing: ‘Oh! how happy I have been
shopping in
this town on the Saturday before Christmas. The thronging crowds afford
a
liberal education as to the inner being of the county – the
eighteenth-century
country faces of the farmers, homely and hearty, as they stand in the
crowds
outside the Antelope, … the face of a farm labourer almost religious in
its
refinement, glimpsed for a moment as the man passes along the pavement
with a
sprig of holly in his cap.
‘To
be abroad in Dorchester on a Christmas
Eve is an experience never to be forgotten,’ he waxed happily,
continuing, ‘by
half-past three, with the first snow of the year fluttering down, the
shops are
brightly lighted. The streets offer many a lively scene – the country
woman,
over-burdened with parcels and with young-eyed children one, two, and
three all
clinging to the folds of her round skirt; the town girl light of step
with a
present for true love; the aged upstairs lodger, glad to have been
about in the
taverns Christmassing; the genial fishwife, my own friend, at her
place, with
two heaps piled up on her wide wooden tray, the one of silver, the
other of
gold – for see how her fat fresh herrings shine silver bright, her
oranges from
Spain like a pyramid of brass!’
From Dorset Life magazine (to
read the full article,
please click here)
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