A Glastonbury Romance A Glastonbury Romance A Glastonbury Romance was written by John Cowper Powys (1873–1963) in rural upstate New York and first published by Simon and Schuster in New York City in March 1932. An English edition published by John Lane followed in 1933. It is the second of Powys's Wessex novels, along with "Wolf Solent" (1929), "Weymouth Sands" (1934) and "Maiden Castle" (1936). Powys was an admirer of Thomas Hardy and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset parts of Hardy's mythical Wessex. The first two chapters of "A Glastonbury Romance" takes place in Norfolk, where the late Canon William
Wessex chalk downland of Wessex was traversed by the Harrow Way, which can still be traced from Marazion in Cornwall to the coast of the English Channel near Dover, and was probably connected with the ancient tin trade. During the Roman occupation starting in the 1st century AD, numerous country villas with attached farms were established across Wessex, along with the important towns of Dorchester and Winchester (the ending -chester comes from Latin "castra", "a military camp"). The Romans, or rather the Romano-British, built another major road that integrated Wessex, running eastwards from Exeter through Dorchester to Winchester and Silchester and