The Letters of John Cowper Powys
to Philippa Powys
Collected here for the first time are more than 200 letters from the tireless pen of John Cowper Powys to his sister Philippa, whom he dubbed his 'Sea Eagle'. The period they span, from his early days of lecturing in the United States during the First World War to his 88th year in 1961, is greater than any volume of Powys's letters published so far. Catharine Edith Philippa Powys, known in the family as Katie, had a novel and a volume of poems published in 1930. "Write, write, write, O Sea Eagle!' says Powys, 'write with a great flying feather from your own strong wing — for only you only you alone — can write books like this.'
But despite such encouragement, none of her half dozen other novels was ever to find a publisher, while the works of her famous literary brothers — John Cowper, Theodore and Llewelyn — continued to appear and attract admirers. How crushing that must have been in one so sensitive and passionate, but how alive to her griefs and struggle with life these letters show John Cowper to be, how consolatory to her restless spirit. Whether writing from hotel rooms across the States or from his tiny house in the Welsh mountains, these letters to Katie, at home in the Dorset countryside, brim with humour, wisdom and zest for life that were Powys's own, from observations of wayside flowers to reflections on the atom-bomb. As always, the presence of literary spirits is everywhere felt — Dostoievsky, Nietzsche, Tennyson, Pater, Charles Lamb and Shelley, and Walt Whitman in particular, Katie's favourite poet. The widely-scattered but tight-knit Powys family haunt these pages too, replete with nostalgia for a shared Victorian childhood, as the world lurches from one catastrophe to another. How lovingly John Cowper wrote these letters; how eagerly must Katie have awaited them.
214mm x 133mm, 368 pp. and 4 pp. of illustrations.
ISBN 0-900821-51-5 £35.00
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