Powys Society Publication Shop

Jack and the Abject was published as a supplement to The Powys Journal Vol. XXXVI (2026). A small run of additional copies have been printed to make it more widely available.

John Cowper Powys‘s relationship with Phyllis Playter was one of the most extraordinary love affairs of the twentieth century. Lasting from the moment of their first meeting in March 1921 until his death in June 1963, it spanned ages (he was twenty-two years her senior), continents (thirteen years in the US and twenty-nine in the UK) and modes (they never married but lived together, effectively as man and wife, she his “American companion” while he remained married to another). As revealed in Powys’s Autobiography (1934), in his diaries, and through fictional characters in his celebrated novels including Wolf Solent (1929) and A Glastonbury Romance (1932), his conception of human relationships and his own sexuality were far from conventional. Those works explore with remarkable candour and insight the inner lives of individuals bound up in intimate relations of various, often unusual, kinds. Now, for the first time, Powys’s profound passion for and long-lasting dependence upon an astute but melancholic woman, so much younger than and so very different from himself, is revealed through the publication of a selection from his letters sent to her throughout the early years of their partnership.

One of the great cult novels, a book that can be read and re-read throughout a lifetime, A Glastonbury Romance is John Cowper Powys’ masterpiece. Set in a beautifully imagined fictional version of the West Country, the novel inhabits a twentieth century under siege from older and stranger forces.

An epic work of terrific force and lyrical intensity, interweaving the ancient with the modern, the novel probes the mystical and spiritual ethos of Glastonbury and its association with the legend of the Grail. At the heart of the book is the vision of one man, who wishes to make Glastonbury again the great pilgrimage centre it once was. But what really lies in this powerful landscape and why did so many men and women once come to it seeking redemption?

This edition reverts to the original Simon & Schuster text of the 1932 edition before the English libel case and consequent cuts and revisions. All English language print editions after 1934 have omitted the key passages that are now at last restored.