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Purchase this book from amazon.co.uk Morine Krissdóttir is the author of John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest and editor of Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929-1939 and The Dorset Year: The Diary of John Cowper Powys, June 1934-July 1935. She edited the first complete edition of Powys’s masterpiece, Porius available now from Duckworth. | Descents of Memory
The Life of John Cowper PowysMorine Krissdóttir ‘A remarkable book’ Margaret Drabble ‘Using a mass of new material, Descents of Memory is an inspired study of the tangled and precarious life of an absurdly neglected writer.’ Literary Review The first complete biography of the lost genius of English letters. John Cowper Powys’s works have been described as 'the only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared to the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky … with an immensity to which only Blake could provide a parallel in English literature’ (George Steiner, The New Yorker). His talents were manifested by such books as his Autobiography, Wolf Solent, Weymouth Sands, and A Glastonbury Romance. In this, Powys’s first comprehensive biography, eminent scholar Morine Krissdottir delves into the life of the writer, from his childhood in Derbyshire through his celebrated lecture tours through England and the US; from his life’s loves to his relationship with his own writing. Krissdottir demonstrates that Powys – known as much for his essays, letters, poetry, and philosophy as he was his fiction – was a man whose writing had a scope matched only by the breadth his life. Using primary sources, never-before-seen archival materials (including photos), and Powys’s own writings, Krissottir pieces together this life in a way that will be impossible to forget. |
