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
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