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The year 1909 was a watershed in the life of Llewelyn Powys, a year that 'began with a disaster and ended with a catastrophe.' The former was an ill-conceived and occasionally farcical lecture tour in America, the latter his contraction of pulmonary tuberculosis, a feared and potentially lethal disease that was never to leave him and was profoundly to influence his philosophy of life. Dr. Peter Foss, editor of The Diary of a Sherborne Schoolboy: Llewelyn Powys's Diary for 1903 (2005) and The Diary of a Reluctant Teacher: Llewelyn Powys's Diary for 1908 (2006), rounds off this Powys Heritage trilogy with the first complete and unadulterated publication of Llewelyn Powys's third diary, extensively and illuminatingly annotated. With his brother John Cowper Powys emerging ever more prominently into his life, and the figure of Edgar Allan Poe hovering ominously in the background, the diary superbly captures the agitations and delights of a year in which the still unsettled Llewelyn Powys, determined to remain a 'bohemian' in spirit, was drawn up short by the realities of 'blood-spitting'.
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