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
House of Wessex of the House of Wessex in the female line, something that contemporary English commentators noted with approval. For a family tree of the House of Wessex from Cerdic down to the children of King Alfred the Great, see: A continuation into the 10th and 11th centuries can be found at A coat of arms was attributed by medieval heralds to the Kings of Wessex. These arms appear in a manuscript of the thirteenth century, and are blazoned as "Azure, a cross patonce" (sometimes a "cross fleury" or "cross moline") "between four martlets Or". The assigning of arms to the West