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
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