The Powys Society Conference 2025: Speakers
Morine Krissdóttir was Chair of the Powys Society from 1988 to 1997. Morine established the Powys Archive. She was curator of the Powys Society collection during the period it was located at the Dorset County Museum and produced a comprehensive and detailed inventory of our Powys holdings (now at the University of Exeter). Morine has written three books about John Cowper Powys (JCP and the Magical Quest, [1980]; Descents of Memory. [2007]; Petrushka and the Dancer – the Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929-1939), [1995]; Morine also edited with Roger Peers, The Dorset Year – the diary of John Cowper Powys, June 1934 to June 1935, [1998]. In 2022 Morine gave a lecture at our annual conference on the deleted chapters of Wolf Solent which she called ‘Editing a Volcano’. Morine has contributed many articles to the Powys Journal and the Powys Society Newsletter.
Morine is presently editing the letters of JCP to Phyllis Playter which will be the subject of her lecture. Morine says “This is a huge project which will cast new light on their lives.”
Kim Wheatley is Professor of English at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her book, John Cowper Powys and the Afterlife of Romanticism: Re-imagining William Wordsworth and John Keats, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in February 2025. (She describes the book elsewhere in Newsletter No.114, March 2025.) Her previous books are Shelley and His Readers (1999) and Romantic Feuds (2013). She also edited Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture (2003). Kim has written three separate articles on JCP, all published in The Powys Journal in recent years: ‘John Cowper Powys on the Genius of Charles Lamb’, ‘“The Poet of Fear”: John Cowper Powys on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, and ‘The Early Reception of Wolf Solent’. Her previous articles include two on Percy Bysshe Shelley, both published in the Keats-Shelley Journal. Her essay on early reviews of Shelley is forthcoming in Percy Shelley in Context (Cambridge University Press). Kim last delivered a lecture on Wordsworth and JCP at our annual conference in 2023.
Kim writes: In his essay on the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in Visions and Revisions (1915), John Cowper Powys echoed the Victorian idealisation of Shelley: ‘His beautiful epicene face, his boyish figure, his unearthly sensitiveness, haunt us as we read his lines’ (p. 177). While Powys had inherited an ‘unearthly’ image of Shelley from certain Victorian admirers of the poet, he embraced (and occasionally criticised) competing versions of Shelley—unearthly, earthly, and in-between. Moreover, separating his vision of Shelley from those of the Victorians, he tended to see Shelley’s poetry as tinged with paradoxically pleasurable feelings of sorrow, sorrow that can be interpreted as nostalgia for the passing of Romanticism. I will examine Powys’s accounts of Shelley from across his long career, tracing his enduring admiration of (and intermittent scepticism about) the poet in his poems, lectures, essays of literary appreciation (not just the one on Shelley himself), letters, and works of fiction. (I wrote in the July 2023 Newsletter about how JCP repurposed a book of Shelley’s poetry as a gift for the family nurse and friend, Emily Clare, adding quotations and commentary.) We will see that JCP sanctioned Shelley’s counter-cultural views such as his advocacy of vegetarianism and ‘free love’. However, JCP’s celebration of what he called Shelley’s ‘ethereal materialism’ is complicated by his somewhat satirical treatment of his character based on Shelley, the self-proclaimed philosophical anarchist Paul Trent of A Glastonbury Romance.
Hilary Bedder is a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She was a secondary school teacher for many years, but returned to study in 2016, gaining a PhD in 2023 on the use of vegetation in the work of Thomas Hardy and Olive Schreiner. She is now working on her first monograph and has had work published in English in Africa, and Green Letters. She has contributed a chapter on Thomas Hardy to a forthcoming book on historicity in the literature of the nineteenth-century, to be published by Manchester University Press. She is now working on Sylvia Townsend Warner with whom she was acquainted when they both lived in the same West Dorset village in the 1970s.
Hilary writes: My talk will consider the influence of East Chaldon and the work of Theodore Powys on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s female characters across her poetry, short stories, and novels. Warner first met Theodore when she visited East Chaldon in 1922, subsequently moving to live there herself. One can trace, at least in her early work, how she draws on village life and the inhabitants of East Chaldon, as did Theodore. In particular, I want to think about Warner and Theodore’s women characters. Theodore’s women can largely be read as types: nubile young maidens who sexually tempt the village men or aged crones, whereas Warner’s quite eccentric women are much more fully drawn. I argue that through these female characters, Warner ‘politicises the pastoral’ (Paul Robichaud) much more so than does Theodore. In the countryside, many of Warner’s women find the opportunity to escape from restrictive social norms, and she uses them to subvert and undermine male-inscribed values of hierarchy, civilisation, and rationality. Through comparing Warner and Theodore’s representation of the people of such rural communities, East Chaldon in particular, I hope to shed light on the work of both of these writers.
Nicholas Birns teaches at New York University. He served as the final editor (1995-2002) of the Powys Notes and spoke to the 2015 and 2018 Powys conferences. He is the author most recently of The Literary Role of History in the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Routledge, 2024), Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel (Cambridge UP, 2023; co-edited with Louis Klee), The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Space (Lexington, 2019) and A Companion to Anthony Trollope (McFarland, 2021). In 2024, Nicholas Birns was named a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities for his contribution to the study of global literature. Nicholas gave lectures at our annual conference in 2015,. ‘Powys’s Radical Medievalism, Porius and Owen Glendower’; and in 2018 on ‘Close Reading the Powyses’.
Nicholas writes about his lecture this year: Ducdame (1925), JCP.s fourth written and third published novel, can also be called the last of his first novels. Ducdame is an underestimated work. Its language is moving and lyrical. Its characters—the charismatic “megalomaniacal subjectivist” Rook Ashover; his vulnerable, frail brother Lexie, two very different young women in Netta Page and Nell Hastings, and Nell’s inspired, maddened husband Will—constitute an intimate ensemble that makes the novel particularly tangible and legible. Very much of its time in some ways—its titular quotation from As You Like It (here signalling a far deeper engagement with Shakespeare) concomitant with the trend of using famous lines as titles—it was quite unfashionable in others. As Paul Roberts noted in the Powys Journal in 1999, Ducdame was often criticized by contemporary reviews for its length—a criticism which would not have been made in the nineteenth century—and the young William Faulkner castigated it for having too many nature descriptions. Unlike Hardy’s Wessex novels (and JCP’s own Rodmoor) the novel refers to real places and towns, and it centres on occupants and recentres on an upper-class milieu in ways that would not have been perceived as avant-garde. Its “etherealized chemistry” hovers between the denotative and the connotative, the human and nonhuman, and (especially with the theme of Rook's needing to produce an heir) the Victorian and modern, On the hundredth anniversary of its publication, this is an opportunity to reread and revalue this superb novel.
Raymond Crozier has pursued an academic career in psychology since obtaining his PhD from Keele University in 1974. He held chairs in psychology in Cardiff University and the University of East Anglia, and since retirement has been an honorary professor in the School of Social Sciences in Cardiff University. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He has authored five books and co-authored one, these have been translated into six languages, and edited or co-edited seven books. Ray has continued research since retirement and is currently involved in a study of children’s shyness in Norwegian schools funded by the Norwegian government along with colleagues in Oslo, Oxford and Canada. Retirement has allowed him to pursue his interests in fiction and biography and in particular the Powyses, triggered by John Cowper’s Weymouth Sands and his Autobiography. He has been a member of the Powys Society for many years and a keen visitor to many of the Powys homes, including Patchin Place on his first trip to New York in 1995. It was only after further visits to the alley that he began to investigate JCP and Phyllis Playter’s life there, and this led to an article in The Powys Journal in 2018, XXVIII, pp. 65-91 and eventually, the book Patchin Place: The Powyses and Literary New York, published by the Sundial Press in 2022. More recently, he has become interested in their residences in Manhattan in addition to Patchin Place.
Ray writes about his presentation: The Powys connection with Patchin Place is well known, beginning with Alyse Gregory’s invitation to Llewelyn at the end of 1921 to visit her at number 4, to John Cowper and Phyllis Playter moving into the upper rooms at the same address in 1924 and their eventual departure for upstate New York in 1929, finally relinquishing the rooms the following year. However, John Cowper Powys had been resident in various rooming houses and apartments in Manhattan from at least 1913. For some of the time he shared with his sister Marian, later with Llewelyn, and then with both of them. Their accommodations in the city included West 12th Street, St Luke’s Place, West 21st Street, Waverly Place and Bedford Street, all quite close to each other. Marian also purchased a property at Snedens Landing, across the Hudson River.
My PowerPoint presentation aims to provide a visual record of the Powyses’ various addresses together with other relevant locations in and around Greenwich Village. I have collected these images from a variety of published sources. The Powyses occupied rooms in cheap dwelling houses; these properties are now extremely expensive and their architecture is much admired and is the subject of preservation campaigns. I envisage an informal presentation with commentary rather than a formal lecture.