Maiden Castle (novel) Maiden Castle (novel) Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys was first published in 1936 and is the last of Powys so-called Wessex novels, following "Wolf Solent" (1929), "A Glastonbury Romance" (1932), "Weymouth Sands" (1934). Powys was an admirer of 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" is set in Dorchester, Dorset Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, and which Powys intended to be a "rival" to Hardy's "Mayor of Casterbridge". Glen Cavaliero describes Dorchester
Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels absent from her novels, such as the American Revolutionary War and the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, the French Revolution, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the British Empire. Indeed, rather than a depiction of the history of English society at large, Jane Austen's novels provide an understanding of the way of life of the lowest level of the gentry in rural England at the turn of the 19th century. All of Jane Austen's novels are set against the background of daily life in English Georgian society at the turn of the 19th century. As the