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
William Gilbert (author) buried in The Close at Salisbury. Direct descendants of the Gilbert family still live in Cornwall, England. William Gilbert (author) William Gilbert (20 May 1804 – 3 January 1890) was an English writer and Royal Navy surgeon. He wrote a considerable number of novels, biographies, histories, essays (especially about the dangers of alcohol and the plight of the poor) and popular fantasy stories, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s. Some of these have been reprinted in recent decades and are still available today. He is best remembered, however, as the father of dramatist W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan.