Wolf Solent is a 1929 novel by John Cowper Powys (1872-1963), the first of his four Wessex novels, though he was living in New York City when he wrote it. It tells of the eponymous character, modelled on Powys himself, returning to his childhood home town of Ramsgard in Dorset, a fictionalised version of Sherborne, following a mental breakdown which had cost him his previous job as a history teacher in London. There, he takes up a job as a literary assistant to the squire of nearby Kings Barton, modelled on Bradford Abbas.The novel chronicles his inner turmoil as he comes to believe that the book he is working on is immoral, and the squire the embodiment of evil.
The novel was published to great critical acclaim. VS Pritchett, writing in The Spectator, called it “as beautiful and strange as an electric storm”. However, this strangeness has meant that Powys has always remained something of a cult author, and has never achieved the mainstream appeal of Thomas Hardy, whose Wessex novels provided the model for Powys’s.