Long Fiction:
Black Bryony, 1923
Mark Only, 1924
Mr. Tasker’s Gods, 1925
Mockery Gap, 1925
Innocent Birds, 1926
Mr. Weston’s Good Wine, 1927
Kindness in a Corner, 1930
Unclay, 1931
Make Thyself Many, 1935
Goat Green, 1937
Short Fiction:
The Left Leg, 1923
Feed My Swine, 1926
A Strong Girl, 1926
A Stubborn Tree, 1926
What Lack I Yet?, 1927
The Rival Pastors, 1927
The Dewpond, 1928
The House with the Echo, 1928
Fables, 1929 (reissued as No Painted Plumage in 1934)
Christ in the Cupboard, 1930
The Key of the Field, 1930
Uriah on the Hill, 1930
The White Paternoster, 1930
The Only Penitant, 1931
Uncle Dottery, 1931
When Thou Wast Naked, 1931
The Two Thieves, 1932
The Tithe Barn, 1932
Captain Patch, 1935
Bottle’s Path, and Other Stories, 1946
God’s Eyes A-Twinkle, 1947
Nonfiction:
An Interpretation of Genesis, 1908
The Soliloquy of a Hermit, 1916
Of the three Powys (POH-uhs) brothers distinguished in literature–John Cowper, Theodore Francis, and Llewelyn–the second, though not the most famous, was the one who wrote most successfully within the conventions of the mid-twentieth century novelistic form. T. F. Powys may be numbered among those writers to whose narrative talent is added a mystical insight. He had reached the age of forty-seven before his first volume of fiction appeared, but he had practiced his craft in silence for many years. He may be grouped with such writers as Violet Paget, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Kenneth Grahame, and Arthur Machen, all of whom drew inspiration from the hypothesis that nature is tenanted by animistic forces. The Edwardian decade and after was a great period of haunted literature, as much an age of tales about fauns, banshees, and goblins as it was of social-protest novels and comic-opera romances. This was the period when Powys began to write.
Unlike those of his contemporaries who, in the tradition of Celtic folklore, contrasted the normal human world with a realm of supernatural creatures, Powys depicted an inward haunting, the presence of the cosmic powers of good and evil in humankind. His human characters are almost incarnations, and hence they often have an allegorical quality: In Unclay the central figure, John Death, is Death; in Mr. Weston’s Good Wine Mr. Weston is God. However, Powys always emphasized human traits; his personages seem as homely and local as the rustic Dorset villages through which they move.
Powys’s technique arose from his acute perception of nature’s unseen powers. It would be misleading to speak of “possession” or of “immanent spirits” or to regard him as an ordinary pantheist. Such terms imply a dualism in which the material and the spiritual, however intermingled, remain distinguishable. Powys conceived rather a complete, monistic identification of all nature, human and external, with the passionate intelligence of a creator responsible alike for beauty and for pain. Powys’s insistence on the truth of matter explains the occasional elements of horror, and even of foulness, in his stories.
Powys’s interest in the uncanny and the supernatural is never doctrinaire. Though not a believing Christian in his adult life, Powys in Mr. Weston’s Good Wine recognizes the human need for transcendence while at the same time postulating that, if human beings were actually to meet God, they would be more intoxicated than illuminated, more drunk with the power of God to heal pain than actually redeemed by his mercy. The brute materialism evinced by the title character in Mr. Tasker’s Gods is mocked by the novel, yet no clear alternative is given. Black Bryony is interesting because of its strong portrait of a woman character, a Salvation Army preacher who is confronted by unexpected evil. This theme, of the irresoluble conflict between the morality to which humans aspire and the evil to which they too often succumb, is a hallmark of Powys’s work.
Powys’s interest in evil fit into modernist preoccupations, and his concise and parabolic style was more pleasing to the critical consensus fostered by academics such as F. R. Leavis than were the long, sprawling narratives of John Cowper Powys. Eventually, though, John Cowper was considered to be the most significant of the Powys brothers.
Powys’s philosophical essays, An Interpretation of Genesis and The Soliloquy of a Hermit, set forth the ideas that later became visible in his fiction. Powys married Violet Dodds in 1905; his wife was eleven years his junior. The marriage, which was not untroubled, produced a son, Bertie, who was tragically murdered by tribesmen in Africa. Powys and his wife later adopted a daughter, Susan. T. F. Powys lived most of his life in Dorset, where he became friends with a community of writers that included David Garnett and Sylvia Townsend Warner. He died on November 27, 1953.