Wolf Solent
Sherborne Abbey, Sherborne, Dorset.
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| Author | John Cowper Powys |
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| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Bildungsroman |
| Publisher | Simon and Schuster, New York |
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Publication date
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1929 |
| Preceded by | Ducdame (1925) |
| Followed by | A Glastonbury Romance (1932) |
Wolf Solent is a novel by John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) published in 1929. This, Powys's fourth novel, was his first literary success. It is a bildungsroman in which the eponymous protagonist, a thirty-four-year-old history teacher, returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy. Wolf resembles John Cowper Powys in that an elemental philosophy is at the centre of his life and, because, like Powys, he hates science and modern inventions like cars and planes, and is attracted to slender, androgynous women. Wolf Solent is the first of Powys's four Wessex novels. Powys wrote both about the same region as Thomas Hardy and was a twentieth-century successor to the great nineteenth-century novelist.
The novel is set in the fictional towns of Ramsgard, Dorset, based on Sherborne, Dorset, where Powys attended school from May 1883, and Blacksod, modelled on Yeovil, Somerset, as well as other places in Dorset like Dorchester and Weymouth that were also full of memories for Powys.
Wolf Solent was Powys's first successful novel. There were six impressions of the first edition (American) between 1929 and 1930, three of the British. A German translation appeared in 1930 and French in 1931. However, Powys had to cut some 350 pages from his manuscript before Wolf Solent was published by Simon and Schuster. Following the success of Wolf Solent three of Powys's works of popular philosophy were also best-sellers: The Meaning of Culture (1929), In Defence of Sensuality (1930), A Philosophy of Solitude (1933).
Prior to this Powys had published three apprentice novels: Wood and Stone (1915), Rodmoor (1916), Ducdame (1925), and had also written After My Fashion in 1920, though it was not published until 1980. He had begun work on Wolf Solent in February 1925, It is "the first of the four Wessex novels which established John Cowper Powys's reputation", an allusion not only to the place but to the influence of Thomas Hardy on him: his first novel, Wood and Stone was dedicated to Hardy.
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