Weymouth Sands

Weymouth Sands
Weymouth seafront
AuthorJohn Cowper Powys
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
Published1934 US; 1936 UK as Jobber Skald
PublisherSimon & Schuster
Media typePrint
Preceded byA Glastonbury Romance (1932) 
Followed byAutobiography (1934); Maiden Castle (1936) 

Weymouth Sands is a novel by John Cowper Powys, which was written in rural upper New York State and published in February 1934 in New York City by Simon and Schuster. It was published in Britain as Jobber Skald in 1935 by John Lane. Weymouth Sands was the third of John Cowper Powys's so-called Wessex novels, which include Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), and Maiden Castle (1936).[1] Powys was an admirer of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset, part of Hardy's mythical Wessex. American scholar Richard Maxwell describes these four novels "as remarkably successful with the reading public of his time".[2]

The setting of this novel is the English seaside town of Weymouth, Dorset, and according to Samuel Levenson: “There are nineteen main characters, ... forty or more minor ones; ... a dozen main plots and as many minor ones, and "the author takes us into every street and alley in Weymouth".[3]

  1. ^ Herbert Williams, John Cowper Powys. Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 1997, p. 94.
  2. ^ "Two Canons: On the Meaning of Powys's Relation to Scott and his Turn to Historical Fiction", Western Humanities Review, vol. LVII, no. 1, Spring 2003, p. 103.
  3. ^ , “High and Dry”. New Masses, 27 March, 1934, p. 26