Wolf Solent

Blurb

Wolf Solent is a novel by John Cowper Powys published in 1929. This, Powys's fourth novel, was his first literary success. It is a bildungsroman in which the eponymous protagonist, a thirty-four-year-old history teacher, returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy. Wolf resembles John Cowper Powys in that an elemental philosophy is at the centre of his life and, because, like Powys, he hates of science and modern inventions like cars and planes, and is attracted to slender, androgynous women. Wolf Solent is the first of Powys's four Wessex novels, a description that indicates that Powys wrote both about the same region as Thomas Hardy and was a twentieth century successor to this great nineteenth century novelist.
The novel is set in in the fictional towns of Ramsgard, Dorset, which based on Sherborne, Dorset, where Powys attended school from May 1883, and Blacksod, modelled on Yeovil, Somerset, as well as other places in Dorset like Dorchester and Weymouth that were also full of memories for Powys.