Upcoming Society Events for 2026
24–25 October 2026 — Hardy, Powys: Time and Place
A Joint Study Day with the Thomas Hardy Society
Thomas Hardy and the Powys Family
Starts 10:00 until 17:00
The Casterbridge Room, The King’s Arms, 30 High East Street, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1HF
On 24 October a one day event at the historic coaching inn, The Kings Arms Dorchester, will look at the Wessex region as a context for the life and works of the Powyses and how they interconnect with, and were inspired by, Thomas Hardy and his circle.
On the following morning there will also be an optional Sunday guided walk to Chaldon Herring, where several members of the Powyses lived, alongside Sylvia Townsend-Warner, Valentine Ackand, Elizabeth Muntz, Richard Garnett and many others, followed by a lunch at The Sailor’s Return.
£25.00 for Powys Society Members
Tuesday 8 December 2026 — The Writing of Theodore Powys: Mr Tasker’s Gods.
Latest in the series of Zoom discussions curated and led by Dawn Collins
At 19:00 GMT
All are welcome: those wishing to participate please e-mail Dawn Collins at photowink@me.com.
Our next T.F. Powys book to read and discuss will be Mr Tasker’s Gods, which is reasonably easy to get from Faber’s excellent imprint Faber Finds or as an Amazon Kindle eBook. Used copies of earlier print editions are also available through Abebooks.
‘Mr Tasker’s Gods was T. F. Powys’s first novel. Written during the First World War it wasn’t published until 1925. It is an unsettling work constantly showing the brutal reality behind the facades. Mr Tasker himself, on the surface, a respectable farmer and God abiding churchwarden is, in fact, ‘a brute beast of the most foul nature’ Many of the initial reviews were hostile, but that was largely because of the author’s treatment of the church. It is under constant attack with the services being described as ‘a sort of roll-call to enable authority to retain a proper hold upon the people’.
(From Faber Finds)
We march onward, pursuing where possible, a chronological read through his available works.
The Powys Reviews available on our website, have many good articles on Theodore Powys.
Likewise this search on JSTOR’s Powys Journal page shows a wealth of material
Past Events 2026
Tuesday 13 October 2026 — The Writing of Theodore Powys: Mark Only.
Latest in the series of Zoom discussions curated and led by Dawn Collins
At 19:00 BST
All are welcome: those wishing to participate please e-mail Dawn Collins at photowink@me.com.
Our first book to read and discuss will be Mark Only, which is reasonably easy to get from Faber’s excellent imprint Faber Finds or as an Amazon Kindle eBook. Used copies of earlier print editions are also available through Abebooks.
‘Heavy clouds darkened the Dodderdown Church one Sunday in December. There was a baptism in progress that afternoon.’ A little later on, ‘What name?’ he asked crossly. ‘Mark’ replied Mr Andrews, and then added a little louder, ‘Mark only.’ . . . . ‘Mark Only, I baptize thee in the name of the Holy Ghost.’ A mistake, of course, but this accident of nomenclature sets the principal character on a life of misfortune.
(From Faber Finds)
From there, we will make, where possible, a chronological read through his available works.
The Powys Reviews available on our website, have many good articles on Theodore Powys.
Likewise this search on JSTOR’s Powys Journal page shows a wealth of material
13 August 2026 — Llewelyn Powys birthday walk
From Anthony Head:
The annual gathering in East Chaldon for the Llewelyn Birthday Walk will take place this year on Thursday, August 13th, the day before the Powys Society Conference in Street. It will be a timely opportunity for members to meet for lunch and the traditional toast – most likely, as usual, at The Sailor’s Return – and look around the village, with its various Powys associations, before walking up past Chydyok to Llewelyn’s memorial stone, where anyone can read a favourite passage from Llewelyn’s writings. Time and venue to be confirmed in the July Newsletter. For any enquiries or to confirm attendance, please contact Anthony Head at ajhead2811@gmail.com
All are welcome to participate in the meeting and walk.
21 July 2026 — Women of the Powys Circle: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show
Latest in the series of Zoom discussions curated and led by Dawn Collins
At 19:00 BST
All are welcome: those wishing to participate please e-mail Dawn Collins at photowink@me.com.
ZOOM connection details will be emailed to individuals well before the meeting.
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Summer Will Show was published in 1936.
The novel follows a wealthy English noblewoman who falls in love with a female Jewish revolutionary and becomes involved in the French Revolution of 1848. Warner’s engagement with left wing politics comes to the fore with the uncomfortable consequences of the doctrine that “the end justifies the means”.
Saturday 30 May 2026 — a discussion on the theme of ‘chance groupings’ in Chapter 24 of A Glastonbury Romance “Nature Seems Dead…” led by John Hodgson
Venue: The Old Fire Engine House, 25, St. Mary’s Street. Ely.
11.00 – 16.00 with break for lunch.
All are welcome. The event is free with the exception of lunch which will be available at the venue. A contribution towards the cost of refreshments is voluntary.
If you wish to attend this meeting, please notify the Hon. Secretary,
phone: 07798 615727
email: PowysSec@btinternet.com
“Now o’er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep”.
By alluding to this quote from Macbeth, JCP lets loose the characters of his Romance, freeing them from their conscious identities and control into the chance groupings of a collective dream world:
This particular night of the tenth of December was in reality one of the great turning points in the life of Glastonbury, but the issue of the struggle that went on tonight between the Enemies of the Legend and its Lovers would evade all but supernatural narration, however one might try to body it forth.
And, in the case of John Crow in particular, his malicious side comes to the fore, forming an alliance with Philip.
Out of John Crow’s head, after he had relaxed to sleep that night from his lascivious claspings of Mary’s marbly limbs, there leapt up into the darkness the spiritual form of all the suppressed maliciousness from which he had been suffering in his service of Bloody Johnny. This spiritual form was a shape, a presence, an entity. It was, in fact, the essential soul of John Crow, for the vital consciousness of his sleeping body was but a vague, weak diffusion of electric force. What else could the soul of John Crow do when released in sleep from his life of psychic slavery, but join, with an exultant rebound, all those other wandering spirits who were engaged in killing the Grail. It was not necessary for any palpable shape to fly out of that window in Northload Street in order to join, in a sort of Warlock’s Sabbath, the ill-assorted spirits of Philip Crow and Red Robinson.
There are many other examples of chance groupings in this chapter and members are invited to contribute their own choices from this, or other works of JCP.
19 May 2026 — Women of the Powys Circle: Alyse Gregory, She Shall Have Music
Latest in the series of Zoom discussions curated and led by Dawn Collins
At 19:00 BST
All are welcome: those wishing to participate please e-mail Dawn Collins at photowink@me.com.
ZOOM connection details will be emailed to individuals well before the meeting.
Alyse Gregory’s first novel, published in 1926, draws from Gregory’s real life, gives her a platform for examining her feminist beliefs and, strangely enough, foreshadows the consequences of her life choices. The novel is both a coming of age story and an awakening to feminine consciousness for the heroine, Sylvia Pennington Brown. At the outset, young Sylvia, her mother and her father have just moved to a wealthy suburb of New York City on Long Island. Sylvia’s brother, Burton, is off stage enjoying (as Sylvia views it) a great education and worldly adventures accessible only to men.
Adapted from the introduction to the Sundial Press edition by Janice Gregory.
24 February 2026 — Women of the Powys Circle: Elizabeth Myers, A Well Full of Leaves
Latest in the series of Zoom discussions curated and led by Dawn Collins
At 19:00 GMT
All are welcome: those wishing to participate please e-mail Dawn Collins at photowink@me.com.
ZOOM connection details will be emailed to individuals well before the meeting.
From the Persephone Books website:
A Well Full of Leaves is about a family of four children growing up somewhere in the north of England, with an utterly vile mother who is cruel to her children, self-centred, and deplorable.
“It isn’t everyone who has a mother like ours. She was a specialist whose specialities never touched the kind, the gentle, or the constructive. She was at her best when she was toppling the entire scene. All her dislike of us and the world in general was extended into whatever she was doing. Under her hands soapsuds were angry, clothes sneered, steam menaced, crockery raved…“