Edited by Oliver Marlow Wilkinson assisted by Christopher Wilkinson The Love Letters of John Cowper Powys and Frances Gregg, in two volumes     John Cowper Powys and Frances Gregg met early in 1912, when the young American Imagist attended one of Jack's lectures in Philadelphia. From their first meeting he was in love with the beautiful poetess. Shortly afterwards he wrote a long poem to her which begins, Out of the depths have I caught     thee, O my beloved!     And never again Though all the curses of all the     heavens fall on us, Drowning us, drowning us, drowning     both together Shall thou and I be torn from     each other! Yet, in that very year, 1912, when Jack was increasingly and frantically in love with Frances, she married his friend Louis Wilkinson. Jack himself was already married. While at first he thought that to marry Frances off to this closest friend was an ideal solution, later he was bitterly to regret it. 'Does it give you pleasure,' he wrote to her, 'that at this moment I am experiencing a suffering of a quite damnable kind because you belong to dear little Louis instead of me — Why can't I get your mouth out of my mind?'     Jack and Frances's correspondence, published here in its entirety for the first time, covers a period of thirty years and tells in a spontaneous and uninhibited way, the full story of their passionate love.		The letters tell a truly fascinating tale and include a wealth of new information. Ezra Pound, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Hardy, Hilda Doolittle, Edna St Vincent Millay, D.H. Lawrence, Baron Corvo, and many others make their way through the lives of Jack and Frances. It is in the conflict between the protagonists, however, in their very needs, that the letters are perhaps most illuminating. Frances's side of the correspondence shows that she believed that life should be cherished before art. This, and the demands of her prophetic Christianity, led her into poverty. Travelling the world with her family, she wrote to Jack from huts, ruined manor houses, tents, house-boats, even from beaches and woodlands without a roof over her head. Jack, on the other hand, retired to eyries, in America and Wales, for long stretches of comparative quiet to write his books that were to make him famous.     To himself, Jack is the magician who transforms the nature of existence. Frances often writes in harsh terms to him about this. But she also writes, '...you with those god-like gifts, and with your deep childlike cunning and with that something that is so sweet and pure and beguiling as to be almost heaven-like...'. 'To love Frances is like loving the fires of purgatory,' Jack writes in one of his letters. She identifies herself with Tom O'Bedlam, or with a Crooked Cross, but Jack describes her as '...the greatest woman of genius I can imagine and the strangest'.     The work is edited by Frances Gregg's son and John Cowper Powys's godson, Oliver Wilkinson, and Frances's grandson, Christopher.
	Volume 1 (1912-1929): 214mm x 133mm, 302 pp., frontisp. & 4 pp. of illustrations. ISBN 0-900821-99-X              £29.95 Volume 2 (1930-1941): 262 pp. & 4 pp. of illustrations. ISBN 0-900821-70-1              £29.95