Maiden Castle — John Cowper Powys

From the genius mind of John Cowper Powys, at long last a paperback of the classic novel of life, love, and an earthwork fortress with a bizarre power of influence
The novels of John Cowper Powys are like none other, containing the romantic extravagance and comic exuberance of the great nineteenth-century novels with the self-conscious depth and introspection of the great Modernists. Maiden Castle is the story of Dud No-man, a historical novelist widowed after a yearlong unconsummated marriage to a woman who continues to haunt him. Inspired by pity and his own deep loneliness, Dud takes Wizzie Ravelston, an itinerant circus performer, into his home and heart. Yet even as the characters in Dorchester struggle with the perplexities of love, desire, and faith, it is the looming fortress of Maiden Castle that exerts the otherworldly force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives.