British regional literature of London and the south of England. John Cowper Powys has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and "Wolf Solent", "A Glastonbury Romance" (1932), along with "Weymouth Sands" (1934) and "Maiden Castle" (1936), are often referred to as his Wessex novels. As with Hardy's novels, the landscape plays a major role in Powys's works, and an elemental philosophy is important in the lives of his characters. Powys's first novel "Wood and Stone" was dedicated to Thomas Hardy. "Maiden Castle", the last of the Wessex novels, is set in Dorchester, Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, and which he intended to be
Wessex their home county of Dorset and its neighbouring counties in the south and west of England. Hardy's Wessex excluded Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, but the city of Oxford, which he called "Christminster", was visited as part of Wessex in "Jude the Obscure". He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as with Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex". The film "Shakespeare in Love" included a character called "Lord Wessex" – a title which did not exist in Elizabethan times. The ITV television series "Broadchurch" takes place in the Wessex area, primarily the county of