Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
NameJohn Cowper Powys 
[36, p.8], [54, His own article], [4, 1881], [3, His birth, Q4 of 1872, Ashborne dist, vol 7b, p. 517], [3, His death, Q2 of 1963, Merioneth N dist, vol 8c, p. 11]
[36, p.8], [54, His own article], [4, 1881], [3, His birth, Q4 of 1872, Ashborne dist, vol 7b, p. 517], [3, His death, Q2 of 1963, Merioneth N dist, vol 8c, p. 11]Birth8 Oct 1872, Shirley, Derby
Death17 Jun 1963, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Merioneth
BurialHis ashes on the Chesil beach, near Abbotsbury.
GeneralAuthor, lecturer and noted autobiorapher.
FatherRev Charles Francis Powys (1843-1923)
MotherMary Cowper Johnson (1849-1914)
Spouses
Marriageca May 1896, Newton Abbot district, Devon [3, Their marriage, Q2 of 1896, Newton Abbot dist, vol 6b, p. 269]
ChildrenLittleton Alfred (1902-1954)
Notes for John Cowper Powys
From 1923 his companion was Phyllis Playtor (1894-1982).
In 2007, FreeBMD had transcribed his surname as ‘Powts’; I sent in a correction.
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He was drafted in the US for WW1 (ex Ancestry.com):
Personal Information Draft Card Image What to do next?
Name: John Cowper Powys
City: Manhattan
County: New York
State: New York
Birth Date: Oct 8 1872
Race: White
Roll: 1786814
DraftBoard: 153
Age: View Image
Occupation: View Image
Nearest Relative: View Image
Registration Place: View Image
Height: View Image
Build: View Image
Color of Eyes: View Image
Color of Hair: View Image
Signature: View Image
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His burial (Somerset & Dorset FHS):
Day:
Month:
Year: 1963
Birth day:
Birth month:
Birth year: 1872
Age:
Forenames: John Cowper
Surname: POWYS
Place: Montacute
Dedication: St Catherine
County: Somerset
Country: England
Type: Headstone
Reference: 184
Notes: Son of Charles Francis and Mary Cowper Powys. See also GREY and PENNY.
Sounds like the headstone was in memory of him rather than indicating his burial?
________________
It has been pointed out to me that he, and all his siblings, is a relation of William Cowper the late 18th century poet. His maternal grandfather, William Cowper Johnson was the first to be given Cowper as a second forename. W.C.J.’s paternal grandmother, Catharine Donne, was first cousin of William Cowper whose mother was Anne Donne. While many Donne descendants thought themselves to be descended from, or related to, John Donne the Stuart Divine and Poet, there is no evidence to support this, nor has anyone produced any tree to illustrate it.
_________________
In 2007, FreeBMD had transcribed his surname as ‘Powts’; I sent in a correction.
_________________________________________________________
He was drafted in the US for WW1 (ex Ancestry.com):
Personal Information Draft Card Image What to do next?
Name: John Cowper Powys
City: Manhattan
County: New York
State: New York
Birth Date: Oct 8 1872
Race: White
Roll: 1786814
DraftBoard: 153
Age: View Image
Occupation: View Image
Nearest Relative: View Image
Registration Place: View Image
Height: View Image
Build: View Image
Color of Eyes: View Image
Color of Hair: View Image
Signature: View Image
_________________
His burial (Somerset & Dorset FHS):
Day:
Month:
Year: 1963
Birth day:
Birth month:
Birth year: 1872
Age:
Forenames: John Cowper
Surname: POWYS
Place: Montacute
Dedication: St Catherine
County: Somerset
Country: England
Type: Headstone
Reference: 184
Notes: Son of Charles Francis and Mary Cowper Powys. See also GREY and PENNY.
Sounds like the headstone was in memory of him rather than indicating his burial?
________________
It has been pointed out to me that he, and all his siblings, is a relation of William Cowper the late 18th century poet. His maternal grandfather, William Cowper Johnson was the first to be given Cowper as a second forename. W.C.J.’s paternal grandmother, Catharine Donne, was first cousin of William Cowper whose mother was Anne Donne. While many Donne descendants thought themselves to be descended from, or related to, John Donne the Stuart Divine and Poet, there is no evidence to support this, nor has anyone produced any tree to illustrate it.
_________________
DNB Main notes for John Cowper Powys
Powys, John Cowper 1872-1963
Name: Powys, John Cowper
Dates: 1872-1963
Active Date: 1912
Gender: Male
Field of Interest: Literature and Writing
Occupation: Novelist and miscellaneous writer
Place of Birth: Shirley, Derbyshire
Education: Sherborne School, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Death: Blaenau Ffestiniog, Merioneth
Burial: Chesil beach, near Abbotsbury
Spouse: Margaret Alice Lyon
Likenesses: 1..., 2..., 3...
Sources: J. C. Powys, Autobiography, 1967, Letters to Louis...
Contributor: Kenneth Hopkins
Article
Powys, John Cowper 1872-1963, novelist and miscellaneous writer, was born 8 October 1872 at Shirley, Derbyshire, eldest of the eleven children of the vicar, the Revd Charles Francis Powys, and his wife, Mary Cowper, daughter of the Revd William Cowper Johnson, rector of Yaxham, Norfolk, through whom Powys inherited the blood of the poets Cowper and Donne. Through both parents he came of a long line of country parsons; the Powys family was anciently of Welsh origin, connected in England with the barony of Lilford. When John was seven his father took a curacy at Dorchester, Dorset, and in 1885 became vicar of Montacute, Somerset, so that the conditioning environment on John and his two brothers, Theodore Francis and Llewelyn, was the West Country with which their names as writers are identified. John was educated at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he obtained a second in the historical tripos of 1894. He drifted first into lecturing at girls' schools in the Brighton area; then from 1898 to 1909 lectured for the Oxford University Extension Delegacy. Initially he had no wide ambition to be a writer, but in 1896 and 1899 he issued small collections of poems. In 1896 he married Margaret Alice Lyon (died 1947), sister of his Cambridge friend T. H. Lyon; they had one son, Littleton Alfred, who entered first the Anglican, and afterwards the Roman Catholic, priesthood and died in 1954.
In 1905 John Cowper Powys made his first lecture tour in the United States where after 1909 until 1934 he spent the greater part of each year. He drew large audiences by his remarkable eloquence and became a potent force in popular American culture; his standing may be measured by the fact that he was called as an expert defence witness at the court cases arising from publication of The `Genius' by Theodore Dreiser (1915) and Ulysses by James Joyce [q.v.] (1922).
In 1915 he published his first novel, Wood and Stone, in New York, and thereafter while continuing his profession as lecturer he wrote regularly; and after retiring and returning permanently to Britain he wrote and published steadily until the end of his life, gaining rather than diminishing in power and imagination as time passed. Recognition came slowly, and what may be termed `official recognition' hardly at all; in 1958 he received the plaque of the Hamburg Free Academy of Arts for outstanding services to literature and philosophy, and in 1962 an honorary D.Litt. from the university of Wales; otherwise he was ignored by those responsible for conferring honours and making awards.
The early novels, Wood and Stone, Rodmoor (New York, 1916), and Ducdame (1925), received little notice, but Wolf Solent (1929) was at once recognized by discerning critics as an important work and the reputation thus established was consolidated by A Glastonbury Romance (New York, 1932, London, 1933) although it remained narrow compared with the celebrity of Joyce and Lawrence. Weymouth Sands (New York, 1934, published in England as Jobber Skald, 1935) and Maiden Castle (New York, 1936, London, 1937) had contemporary settings, but with Owen Glendower (New York, 1940, London, 1942) Powys began a series of historical novels which included Porius (1951), Atlantis (1954), The Brazen Head (1956), and the related prose retelling of the Iliad, Homer and the Aether (1959).
Parallel with his novels Powys wrote a series of philosophical essays for the guidance of the `common man' exposed to the stresses and frustrations of modern urban life: The Meaning of Culture (New York, 1929, London, 1930), A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), The Art of Happiness (1935), The Art of Growing Old (1944), and others. His lifelong study of the world's great writers was reflected in The Pleasures of Literature (1938), Dostoievsky (1947, dated 1946), Rabelais (1948), and several collections of essays; but he also appreciated contemporary developments and his Letters to Louis Wilkinson (1958) are scattered with perceptive judgements on such writers as Henry Miller, (Sir) Angus Wilson, and Arthur Koestler.
It is by half a dozen novels and an astonishing masterpiece, his Autobiography (1934), that Powys will be longest remembered. Introducing a new edition (1967), J. B. Priestley called it `one of the greatest autobiographies in the English language', seeing its greatness in its subjectivity. Here is no chronicle of events, no parade of famous names, almost nothing of how the author's books came to be written. Instead, we see a man as he saw himself, without reticences, without shame, without regrets, without excuses: a self-portrait unique in English and hardly paralleled elsewhere: the warts certainly displayed, but taken for granted, not underlined; and the humanity, the humility, and the genius unconsciously revealed.
The earlier novels present a minutely observed panorama of the West Country, remembered from the author's boyhood: for most of them were written in America and the terrain was deliberately and lovingly evokedóDorchester, Montacute, Sherborne, Weymouth. The major historical novels are set in Wales, Powys's home for his last twenty-eight years, and the evocation here is imaginative for he creates a landscape studded with fortresses and peoples it with warriors, magicians, priests, and serfs. Essentially, all his novelsóindeed, most of his writingsóare concerned with human relationships, often devious, tortured, and hopeless, but enduring. Wolf Solent, John Crow, Dud No-Man, his principal heroes, seem figures arising from himself; but his extraordinary insight into the feelings of women is displayed in a notable group of characters, and a further group of eccentrics and madmen is conceived with the compassion of a Dostoevsky. His faculty of endowing the inanimate with personality produced splendid passages, particularly in Atlantis and certain poems like `The Old Pier Post'. At times his prose is uneven but it reaches and sustains heights of majesty and eloquence denied to more consistent lesser writers.
All members of this remarkable family were striking in appearance and personality, and John Cowper's magnificent head is powerfully seen in Augustus John's frontispiece drawing in Letters to Louis Wilkinson, and in Ivan Opfer's frontispiece to the 1934 English edition of the Autobiography. The portrait by his sister Gertrude Powys is in the National Museum of Wales.
After retiring, Powys lived at Corwen, and later at Blaenau Ffestiniog, Merioneth, where he died 17 June 1963; his ashes were scattered on the Chesil beach, near Abbotsbury.
Sources
J. C. Powys, Autobiography, 1967, Letters to Louis Wilkinson, 1958; Louis Marlow, Welsh Ambassadors: Powys Lives & Letters, 1936; Derek Langridge, John Cowper Powys: a Record of Achievement, 1966; Kenneth Hopkins, The Powys Brothers, 1967; personal knowledge.
Contributor: Kenneth Hopkins
published 1981
______________________
Name: Powys, John Cowper
Dates: 1872-1963
Active Date: 1912
Gender: Male
Field of Interest: Literature and Writing
Occupation: Novelist and miscellaneous writer
Place of Birth: Shirley, Derbyshire
Education: Sherborne School, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Death: Blaenau Ffestiniog, Merioneth
Burial: Chesil beach, near Abbotsbury
Spouse: Margaret Alice Lyon
Likenesses: 1..., 2..., 3...
Sources: J. C. Powys, Autobiography, 1967, Letters to Louis...
Contributor: Kenneth Hopkins
Article
Powys, John Cowper 1872-1963, novelist and miscellaneous writer, was born 8 October 1872 at Shirley, Derbyshire, eldest of the eleven children of the vicar, the Revd Charles Francis Powys, and his wife, Mary Cowper, daughter of the Revd William Cowper Johnson, rector of Yaxham, Norfolk, through whom Powys inherited the blood of the poets Cowper and Donne. Through both parents he came of a long line of country parsons; the Powys family was anciently of Welsh origin, connected in England with the barony of Lilford. When John was seven his father took a curacy at Dorchester, Dorset, and in 1885 became vicar of Montacute, Somerset, so that the conditioning environment on John and his two brothers, Theodore Francis and Llewelyn, was the West Country with which their names as writers are identified. John was educated at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he obtained a second in the historical tripos of 1894. He drifted first into lecturing at girls' schools in the Brighton area; then from 1898 to 1909 lectured for the Oxford University Extension Delegacy. Initially he had no wide ambition to be a writer, but in 1896 and 1899 he issued small collections of poems. In 1896 he married Margaret Alice Lyon (died 1947), sister of his Cambridge friend T. H. Lyon; they had one son, Littleton Alfred, who entered first the Anglican, and afterwards the Roman Catholic, priesthood and died in 1954.
In 1905 John Cowper Powys made his first lecture tour in the United States where after 1909 until 1934 he spent the greater part of each year. He drew large audiences by his remarkable eloquence and became a potent force in popular American culture; his standing may be measured by the fact that he was called as an expert defence witness at the court cases arising from publication of The `Genius' by Theodore Dreiser (1915) and Ulysses by James Joyce [q.v.] (1922).
In 1915 he published his first novel, Wood and Stone, in New York, and thereafter while continuing his profession as lecturer he wrote regularly; and after retiring and returning permanently to Britain he wrote and published steadily until the end of his life, gaining rather than diminishing in power and imagination as time passed. Recognition came slowly, and what may be termed `official recognition' hardly at all; in 1958 he received the plaque of the Hamburg Free Academy of Arts for outstanding services to literature and philosophy, and in 1962 an honorary D.Litt. from the university of Wales; otherwise he was ignored by those responsible for conferring honours and making awards.
The early novels, Wood and Stone, Rodmoor (New York, 1916), and Ducdame (1925), received little notice, but Wolf Solent (1929) was at once recognized by discerning critics as an important work and the reputation thus established was consolidated by A Glastonbury Romance (New York, 1932, London, 1933) although it remained narrow compared with the celebrity of Joyce and Lawrence. Weymouth Sands (New York, 1934, published in England as Jobber Skald, 1935) and Maiden Castle (New York, 1936, London, 1937) had contemporary settings, but with Owen Glendower (New York, 1940, London, 1942) Powys began a series of historical novels which included Porius (1951), Atlantis (1954), The Brazen Head (1956), and the related prose retelling of the Iliad, Homer and the Aether (1959).
Parallel with his novels Powys wrote a series of philosophical essays for the guidance of the `common man' exposed to the stresses and frustrations of modern urban life: The Meaning of Culture (New York, 1929, London, 1930), A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), The Art of Happiness (1935), The Art of Growing Old (1944), and others. His lifelong study of the world's great writers was reflected in The Pleasures of Literature (1938), Dostoievsky (1947, dated 1946), Rabelais (1948), and several collections of essays; but he also appreciated contemporary developments and his Letters to Louis Wilkinson (1958) are scattered with perceptive judgements on such writers as Henry Miller, (Sir) Angus Wilson, and Arthur Koestler.
It is by half a dozen novels and an astonishing masterpiece, his Autobiography (1934), that Powys will be longest remembered. Introducing a new edition (1967), J. B. Priestley called it `one of the greatest autobiographies in the English language', seeing its greatness in its subjectivity. Here is no chronicle of events, no parade of famous names, almost nothing of how the author's books came to be written. Instead, we see a man as he saw himself, without reticences, without shame, without regrets, without excuses: a self-portrait unique in English and hardly paralleled elsewhere: the warts certainly displayed, but taken for granted, not underlined; and the humanity, the humility, and the genius unconsciously revealed.
The earlier novels present a minutely observed panorama of the West Country, remembered from the author's boyhood: for most of them were written in America and the terrain was deliberately and lovingly evokedóDorchester, Montacute, Sherborne, Weymouth. The major historical novels are set in Wales, Powys's home for his last twenty-eight years, and the evocation here is imaginative for he creates a landscape studded with fortresses and peoples it with warriors, magicians, priests, and serfs. Essentially, all his novelsóindeed, most of his writingsóare concerned with human relationships, often devious, tortured, and hopeless, but enduring. Wolf Solent, John Crow, Dud No-Man, his principal heroes, seem figures arising from himself; but his extraordinary insight into the feelings of women is displayed in a notable group of characters, and a further group of eccentrics and madmen is conceived with the compassion of a Dostoevsky. His faculty of endowing the inanimate with personality produced splendid passages, particularly in Atlantis and certain poems like `The Old Pier Post'. At times his prose is uneven but it reaches and sustains heights of majesty and eloquence denied to more consistent lesser writers.
All members of this remarkable family were striking in appearance and personality, and John Cowper's magnificent head is powerfully seen in Augustus John's frontispiece drawing in Letters to Louis Wilkinson, and in Ivan Opfer's frontispiece to the 1934 English edition of the Autobiography. The portrait by his sister Gertrude Powys is in the National Museum of Wales.
After retiring, Powys lived at Corwen, and later at Blaenau Ffestiniog, Merioneth, where he died 17 June 1963; his ashes were scattered on the Chesil beach, near Abbotsbury.
Sources
J. C. Powys, Autobiography, 1967, Letters to Louis Wilkinson, 1958; Louis Marlow, Welsh Ambassadors: Powys Lives & Letters, 1936; Derek Langridge, John Cowper Powys: a Record of Achievement, 1966; Kenneth Hopkins, The Powys Brothers, 1967; personal knowledge.
Contributor: Kenneth Hopkins
published 1981
______________________
Notes for John Cowper & Margaret Alice (Family)
No marriage record on FreeBMD.