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Between his graduation from Cambridge in 1906 and the onset three years later of the tuberculosis that was to determine the course of his life, Llewelyn Powys spent an aimless period trying to decide what career to pursue. The Church had been suggested, but hardly squared with his growing doubts and his attachment to a more Epicurean lifestyle. He ended up dabbling in teaching, and the year 1908 found him employed as a school teacher in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, and as a private tutor in Calne, Wiltshire, more out of a necessity to earn money than love of the profession. But this was also the year in which he took up again the writing of a journal, following the diary he had kept in 1903 while still himself a schoolboy. In this second Powys diary, published here in full for the first time, Dr. Peter Foss, editor of The Diary of a Sherborne Schoolboy: Llewelyn Powys's Diary for 1903 in the Powys Heritage Series (2005), provides a comprehensive and illuminating Introduction that reveals how Powys drew on these early experiences and adapted them for use in later publications, conveying 'the sensuous delight in the snatched moments ... through a resonance and an immediacy which has the frisson of the erotic and the impact of poetry.'
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