Catharine Edith Philippa Powys (icon; 1886–1963), a novelist and poet, belonged to one of the most distinguished families in modern literature.

Family

Among her brothers were the novelists John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys

-Biography:Powys was born in Shirley, Derbyshire, in 1872, the son of the Reverend Charles Francis Powys , who was vicar of Montacute, Somerset for thirty-two years, and Mary Cowper Johnson, a descendent of the poet William Cowper. He came from a family of eleven children, many of whom were also...

 and Theodore Francis Powys (1875-1953) and the essayist Llewelyn Powys

Llewelyn Powys

Llewelyn Powys was a British writer and younger brother of John Cowper Powys and T. F. Powys.-Life:Powys was born in Dorchester, the son of a clergyman, and was educated at Sherborne School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. While lecturing in the United States he contracted tuberculosis...

  as well as Littleton Charles Powys (1874-1955) , headmaster of Sherborne Prep School, and the architect A. R. Powys who was Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded by William Morris, Philip Webb and J.J.Stevenson, and other notable members of the Pre Raphaelite brotherhood, in 1877, to oppose what they saw as the insensitive renovation of ancient buildings then occurring in Victorian...

 and published several books on architecture. Of her sisters, Gertrude Powys was a painter of striking portraits and powerful landscapes, Marian Powys an authority on lace and lace-making. Philippa Powys was the ninth of eleven children in the Powys family's largest and most talented generation and was known to relatives and friends as ‘Katie’.

She was born at Montacute

Montacute

Montacute is a small village and civil parish in Somerset, England, west of Yeovil. The village has a population of 680 . The name Montacute is thought by some to derive from the Latin "Mons Acutus", referring to the small but still quite acute hill dominating the village to the west.The village...

 in Somerset

Somerset

The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...

, and received no formal education. Much of the knowledge she acquired in youth was self-discovered. Her early adult life was spent farming, but in a family of prodigious writers – notably John Cowper Powys, T. F. Powys and Llewelyn Powys – it was no surprise that her own creative energies were channelled into literature from an early age.

Kindred spirits

In 1924 she moved into Chydyok, an isolated farmhouse near the majestic Dorset coastline, with her sister, the artist Gertrude Powys. A few years later her brother, Llewelyn Powys, and his wife, Alyse Gregory

Alyse Gregory

Alyse Gregory was an American suffragist and writer.Her father was a doctor in Nowalk. She showed musical talent at an early age, was sent to Paris, France, to receive a musical education when she was fifteen years old, and continued her study of music on her return to the United States...

, joined them to occupy the adjacent cottage. A couple of miles inland, across whale-backed hills, lay the village of East Chaldon where another brother, Theodore (T.F) Powys, lived as well as the author Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Nora Townsend Warner was an English novelist and poet.-Life:Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora Hudleston...

 and poet Valentine Ackland

Valentine Ackland

Valentine Ackland was an English poet, an important figure in the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century British poetry.-Life:...

.

Work

Despite never achieving the success of her literary brothers she wrote at least two novels at Chydyok that were never published – The Tragedy of Budvale and Joan Callais – as well as a play, The Quick and the Dead. Subsequent novels included The Path of the Gale and Further West, but these too never saw the light of day. In 1930, she had a collection of poems published titled Driftwood , and three short pamphlets of poems appeared thereafter (many of them republished in 1992 in Driftwood and Other Poems). That year also saw her only success as a novelist with The Blackthorn Winter, published by Constable in London and by Richard R. Smith in New York, and to be reissued for the first time in late January 2007 by The Sundial Press . She also kept a journal over several decades which is being edited. In 1957 Philippa Powys moved to the village of Buckland Newton

Buckland Newton

Buckland Newton is a village in north Dorset, England, situated under the scarp of the Dorset Downs, six miles south of Sherborne. The village has a population of 618 . People have worshipped at the Church of the Holy Rood in Buckland Newton since the 13th century.The village lies within the...

in Dorset where she died six years later.

Several published articles on Philippa Powys have appeared in The Powys Journal.