Book description
After My Fashion has an unusual publishing history. Although it was
John Cowper Powys' third novel and written in 1920, it wasn't
published until 1980. It seems that when his US publisher turned it
down Powys made no effort to place it elsewhere. Indeed, when Powys
had finished a book he tended to be oddly indifferent to its fate. The
novel has two other unusual features: its locations (Sussex and
Greenwich Village); and Isadora Duncan being the inspiration for
Elise, the dancer and mistress of the protagonist, Richard Storm
(based quite largely on Powys himself). As one would expect from Powys
the writing is vivid, not least in the descriptions of the Sussex
landscape and the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village.
John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in
the West Country (the Somerset/Dorset border area was to have a lasting
influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a
teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty
years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled
in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life. Those are
the bare bones of his life. In some senses they seem unimportant when
set alongside his extraordinary writing career. Not only was output
prodigious, it was like nothing else in English Literature. Indeed,
George Steiner has made the bold claim that his works are 'the only
novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared to the
fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky'. And even that doesn't touch on
their multifarious strangeness. John Cowper Powys wrote compulsively:
letters, diaries, short stories, fantasies, poetry, literary criticism,
philosophy and, above all, novels poured out of him. He also wrote a
remarkable autobiography. In addition to his Autobiography his
masterpieces are considered to be Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance,
Weymouth Sands and Porius. But his lesser, or less well-known, works
shouldn't be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical,
brilliant and obsessive imagination. John Cowper Powys is a challenging
author with an impressive list of admirers. In addition to George
Steiner, these have included Robertson Davies, Margaret Drabble,
Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, J. B. Priestley and Angus Wilson.
