John Cowper Powys Thomas Hardy, and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset, part of Hardy's mythical Wessex. American scholar Richard Maxwell describes these four novels "as remarkably successful with the reading public of his time". "Maiden Castle", the last of the Wessex novels, is set in Dorchester, Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, and which he intended to be a "rival" to Hardy's "Mayor of Casterbridge". All the same, despite his indebtedness to the Victorian novel and his enthusiasm for Hardy and Walter Scott, as well as for lesser figures such as Ainsworth, Powys was clearly a modernist, and has affinities also with Fyodor
Walter Harris (author) Walter Harris (author) Walter Harris (born 1925) is a British author and broadcaster. He is the author of ten published novels, several volumes of poetry, numerous articles and spoken word recordings. Recordings of his interviews and broadcasts are held at the BBC Sound Archive and the British Library. Harris joined the RAF directly from Haileybury in 1943. In Cairo he was German interpreter to Africa Korps POWs and playwright in RAF Repertory Company and news reader on the Forces Network. Post War, Harris emigrated to Brazil and wrote for two English-language newspapers until being sponsored by a major Canadian-owned public