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
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