Wessex in classical heraldry and is found on a number of church windows in derived shields such as the Arms of the Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster (Westminster Abbey, which was founded by the king). At its greatest extent Wessex encompassed the modern areas of Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Dorset and Wiltshire, as well as the western half of Berkshire and the eastern hilly flank of Somerset. This covers an area of about . The English author Thomas Hardy used a fictionalised Wessex as a setting for many of his novels, adopting his friend William Barnes' term "Wessex" for
The Baroness (novels) reprinted only the first four books in England, with different covers. French translations were published in 1975 by Eroscope under a different series name, "Penny", the nickname of the protagonist in the novels. Eroscope published all eight novels listed above and a ninth, "Photo-Phobie", which was never published in English. Due to the high volume of output in such a short period of time under the Kenyon name, speculations abound whether Kenyon was one author or if this was a pseudonym for more than one writer, a common practice of using house pseudonyms in adventure fiction at that time. Some