The Solitudes (novel)
1988 edition of The Solitudes by VGSF, bearing the original title
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| Author | John Crowley |
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| Original title | Ægypt |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Ægypt |
| Subject | History, Hermeticism, English Renaissance |
| Genre | Modern Fantasy |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
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Publication date
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April 1987 (1st edition) |
| Pages | 390 (Hardcover edition) |
| Followed by | Love & Sleep |
The Solitudes (originally titled Ægypt contrary to Crowley's wishes) is a 1987 modern fantasy novel by John Crowley. It is Crowley's fifth published novel and the first novel in the four-volume Ægypt series. The novel follows Pierce Moffett, a college history professor in his retreat from ordinary, academic life to pastoral life of Faraway Hills. While in the area, Pierce comes up with a plan to write a book about Hermeticism, in the process finding several parallels with his own project and that of the nearly-forgotten local novelist Fellowes Kraft.
The novel takes place in two time periods and features three main protagonists; that of Pierce's in the late twentieth century, and that of John Dee, Edward Kelley and Giordano Bruno as from the historical novels of Kraft in the Renaissance. The difference is marked stylistically by dashes indicating dialogue for events that happened in the Renaissance and events in the twentieth century marked by dialogue in quotation marks.
The novel was nominated for the 1988 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 1988 World Fantasy Award.
The novel is structured basically as a künstlerroman, following the late-life development of Pierce Moffett in his attempts to finish a fictional book combining speculative history, fiction and a fictional world he created as a child called Ægypt. Pierce's two main sources for the book include the work of his graduate professor and speculative historian Frank Walker Barr, and the highly productive historical novelist Fellowes Kraft. Barr's theories are likely based on the speculative historians Crowley cites in his short note at the beginning of the novel, which names the work of Robert Graves, the nearly forgotten Pre-Raphaelite Katharine Emma Maltwood, and especially Dame Frances Yates, who Crowley cites as a deliberate influence, calling the novel a "fantasia on her themes".
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