Maiden Castle
John Cowper Powys
Language: English
Pages: 608
ISBN: 1585671150
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The novels of John Cowper Powys are like none other, containing the romantic extravagance and comic exuberance of the great nineteenth-century novels with the self-conscious depth and introspection of the great Modernists. Maiden Castle portrays in pointillist detail the complexities of sexual and romantic feeling that bedevil an eccentric cast of characters, and explores the psychological idiosyncrasies that fuel their hopes and dreams, fantasies and failures.
At the center of the novel is the aptly named Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart. Their awkward yet endearing efforts to create a life together unfold in counterpoint to the romantic and familial relationships that sizzle and simmer in the village of Dorchester. Yet even as the characters in Maiden Castle struggle with the perplexities of love, desire and faith-readjusting their sights and affections-it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives.
4th in the series of novels
The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn, Book 1)
Palace of Spies (Palace of Spies, Book 1)
Ink and Bone (The Great Library, Book 1)
them up.” She looked steadily at him and their eyes clung to each other. They were standing by the railings, close to the cenotaph. The others were already crossing the road, Claudius and Mr. Wye in front, Uryen and Thuella following them. Neither of the two seemed to wish to be the first to look away; but the girl didn’t feel as if either of them were thinking solely of the other. They each seemed to be looking through the other, down some long receding vista of future days. Almost as
green wheat. To her present mood, the neutral pedestrian, with his halfhearted whistling, was a pleasing episode, while her companion’s fuss over those dusty bones struck her as a most dreary affectation; but she could see that his face had resumed its equanimity as he paused to let the impertinent personage get ahead. “What I mean is, Wizz,” he went on. “Suppose you had started an affair with my father, would it have weighed on your mind when I told you who he was?” She tried submissively to
post-office and ran as follows: “Dear Wizzie, meet me at the entrance to the cathedral between six and seven on Friday. I will be there again on Sunday and I will call for a letter too. My name is D. No-man. The woman said ‘Salisbury,’ so I chanced it! Your friend, D. N. P.S. I live at — High East Street, Dorchester.” Having licked his longest finger with meticulous scrupulosity, Dud fastened up these missives, glancing round savagely at a portly commercial traveller who was fumbling across the
whose state had shocked the fastidious D., the manner in which she caught up one of his hands and kissed it, as reverently as if he’d been some famous sage or formidable potentate, instead of a half-crazed fanatic, whose work wasn’t good enough for a newspaper, all these things had a most releasing effect, not on the man’s senses, but on his tongue. But the flood of strange talk to which she now found herself half-listening—for she had never been one for taking the discourses of the sons of men
his Maiden Castle spirits want him to answer the fellow or to let him be!” “Don’t ‘ee dear! ... Don’t ‘ee say such things!” murmured Claudius, making a quaint little deprecatory motion towards Jenny with one of his hands, a gesture that in some odd way made our friend think of a marble orator in Westminster Abbey. But Mrs. Dearth took no heed. “It was Dumbell,” she cried in a harsh voice. “That’s who it was—poor little old Dumbell when he had his Black-Shirt meeting down here! Claudius went to