page_title: Wolf Solent
section_title: The face on the Waterloo steps
hierarchical_section_title: Wolf Solent / Plot summary / The face on the Waterloo steps
caption_attribution_description: Victory Arch, London Waterloo station
context_page_description: Wolf Solent is a novel by John Cowper Powys that was written in rural upper New York State and published by Simon and Schuster in May 1929 in New York City. The British edition, published by Jonathan Cape, appeared in July 1929. This, Powys's fourth novel, was his first literary success. It is a bildungsroman in which the eponymous protagonist, a thirty-four-year-old history teacher, returns to his birthplace, where he discovers the inadequacy of his dualistic philosophy. Wolf resembles John Cowper Powys in that an elemental philosophy is at the centre of his life and, because, like Powys, he hates science and modern inventions like cars and planes, and is attracted to slender, androgynous women. Wolf Solent is the first of Powys's four Wessex novels. Powys wrote both about the same region as Thomas Hardy and was a twentieth-century successor to the great nineteenth-century novelist.
  The novel is set in the fictional towns of Ramsgard, Dorset, based on Sherborne, Dorset, where Powys attended school from May 1883, and Blacksod, modelled on Yeovil, Somerset, as well as other places in Dorset like Dorchester and Weymouth that were also full of memories for Powys.
context_section_description: An important recurring image in the novel is that of  the face on the steps of Waterloo Station in London, which precipitates Wolf's emotion collapse in front of his history class, and loss of his job. The face of "a man regarded by Wolf as an epitome of the kind of suffering which challenges belief in a benevolent creator". In a letter to his brother Llewelyn, written from Chicago on 18 February 1925, in which Powys mentions working on Wolf Solent, he refers to a beggar that he had seen with "a 'shocking' face". Professor Peter Easingwood suggests that from this encounter came the idea for the face which forms such a "dominant pattern of symbolic imagery" in the novel. This face "of inert despair" is seen by Wolf as linked to "the appalling misery of so many of his fellow Londoners".
  Morine Krissdottir in her biography of Powys, Descent of Memory, dates the action of the novel as taking place between March 1921 and May 1922, just three years after the end of World War I and notes that a "triumphal Victory Arch" was formally opened as the main entrance to Waterloo Station in London on 21 March 1922, to be a memorial to the dead. She also records that "in an ironic twist, the steps [of the Victory Arch] soon became a place where beggars, many of them mentally and physically crippled ex-sevicemen gathered". Furthermore, she also suggests that while there is no direct reference to the war in Wolf Solent "the metaphors and imagery" do in fact allude to it, and that "[t]he novel is in fact about a world after the great war--a world in which everything is irrevocably changed".
caption: Victory Arch, Waterloo station's main entrance, where Wolf Solent had seen the look of "inert despair" on a man's face. The arch was a memorial to the dead of World War I.[53]
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