Two chapters in this book are devoted to John Cowper Powys, whom most readers are likely to consider an improbable choice for even one. Such attention is justified for three reasons: the originality and importance of his life-philosophy and its contribution to anarchist thought; the reformulation of his socio-political outlook as a result of the Spanish Revolution and the resultant impact on his fiction and other writings; and the still insufficient appreciation of his literary achievement.

Between 1929 and 1951 Powys published a series of major novels: Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, Maiden Castle, Owen Glendower and Porius. These are such as to place him for many notable critics and fellow writers – J.B. Priestley, Henry Miller, G. Wilson Knight, Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, George Steiner and A.N. Wilson have been prominent advocates – amongst the greatest novelists of his century. For some it is the Autobiography of 1934, memorable for its far-reaching candour, that remains his exceptional achievement. Since Powys's death in 1963, the republication of all his books, an increasing flow of monographs, and indications of fundamental shifts in general critical assessment, make it increasingly probable that the claims of this minority tradition will eventually become the accepted opinion.

It is virtually impossible to convey the nature of such distinctive fiction. Powys combines twentieth-century introspection and analysis of the relations between men and women with the social panoramas, humour and prolixity of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists. The uninitiated might do worse than to attempt to imagine an amalgam of Lawrence and Dickens, Hardy and Dostoievsky, Proust and Scott. To these great names two others need to be added: that of Wordsworth, in order to suggest Powys's characteristic attention to and communion with the natural world, animate and inanimate; and Blake's, since Powys shares his reverence for life and belief that ‘everything that lives is holy’, as well as his radical rejection of the established order. It is also a commonplace of Powys criticism that he possesses an empathy with women, an entry into the minds and feelings of women, unrivalled by any other male writer.