Place of Visions

After writing Wolf Solent, Powys retired from his hectic life of travel and talk. Wolf Solent was the last book written in trains and hotels. In 1930 he settled at Phudd Bottom, a lonely white frame house near Hillsdale, a remote village in New York State. Here Powys wrote his longest novel, A Glastonbury Romance, which was published in New York in 1932. The mere physical effort of covering so much paper in under two years is hard to imagine. There are over eleven hundred pages in the Macdonald London edition. Most writers would carefully husband such an imaginative concept, bringing out several slim volumes which over a number of years would combine to form a Glastonbury Chronicle. Powys, in less than two years, produced a huge visionary tale of a place and a society, which is both real and transcended.