Novelists parsonage soon after Patrick Brontë's death
Thomas Hardy's (1840–1928) novels can be described as regional because of the way he makes use of these elements in relation to a part of the West of England, that he names
Wessex. On the other hand, it seems much less appropriate to describe
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) as a regional novelist of
London and the south of England.
John Cowper Powys has been seen as a successor to
Thomas Hardy, and
Wolf Solent,
A Glastonbury Romance (1932), along with
Weymouth Sands (1934) and
Maiden Castle (1936), are often referred to as his
Wessex novels. As with Hardy's novels, the
landscape plays a major role in Powys's works, and an elemental philosophy is important in the lives of his characters. Powys's first novel
Wood and Stone was dedicated to Thomas Hardy.
Maiden Castle, the last of the Wessex novels, is set in
Dorchester, Thomas Hardy's
Casterbridge, and which he intended to be a "rival" to Hardy's
Mayor of Casterbridge.
Mary Butts was a modernist novelist who works are also associated with the idea of Wessex. "Like John Cowper Powys|[John Cowper] Powys, she found a key to both personal and national identity by tuning into the deep history of the Dorset landscape [with emphasis on] sacred places and folk traditions". The regional novel is generally seen as originating with
Maria Edgeworth and
Walter Scott, but their regions are hardily "comparable to Hardy's Wessex, Blackmore's Exmoor, or Arnold Bennett's potteries, [... because] they are nations." The term has also been used, in the past, disparagingly, especially with regard to
women writers, as a synonym for minor writing. Other writers that have been characterized as regional novelists, are the
Brontë sisters from
West Yorkshire. In 1904, novelist
Virginia Woolf visited their birthplace
Haworth and published an account in
The Guardian on 21 December. She remarked on the symbiosis between the village and the Brontë sisters. She wrote: "Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell".
Mary Webb (1881–1927),
Margiad Evans (1909–1958) and
Geraint Goodwin (1903–1942), are associate with the Welsh border region.
George Eliot (1801–1886), on the other hand, is particularly associated with the rural English Midlands, whereas
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) is the novelist of the
Potteries in
Staffordshire, or the "Five Towns", (actually six) that now make-up
Stoke-on-Trent.
R. D. Blackmore (1825–1900), was one of the most famous English novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century, and he shared with
Thomas Hardy a Western England background and a strong sense of regional setting in his works. Noted for his eye for and sympathy with nature, critics of the time described this as one of the most striking features of his writings. He may be said to have done for
Devon what
Sir Walter Scott did for the Highlands and Hardy for
Wessex. However, Blackmore is now remembered for one work,
Lorna Doone.
Catherine Cookson (1906 – 1998), who wrote about her deprived youth in
South Tyneside,
County Durham was one United Kingdom's most widely read novelists in the twentieth century.
Sid Chaplin (1916–1986) is another writer from
North-east England, who wrote, amongst other things,
The Day of the Sardine, published in 1961, which is set in a working-class community in
Newcastle upon Tyne,
North Tyneside at the very beginning of the 1960s.
Poets in the
Lake District, of England, where William Wordsworth lived for 14 years. Amongst poets there is
William Wordsworth (1770–1850), and the other
Lake Poets, while the poet
William Barnes (1801–1886) is seen as primarily a
Dorset poet, especially because of his use of Dorset
dialect.
John Clare (1793 – 1864) was commonly known as "the
Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". His formal education was brief, his other employment and class-origins were lowly. Clare resisted the use of the increasingly standardised English grammar and
orthography in his poetry and prose, alluding to political reasoning in comparing "grammar" (in a wider sense of orthography) to tyrannical government and slavery, personifying it in jocular fashion as a "bitch". He wrote in his Northamptonshire dialect, introducing local words to the literary canon such as "pooty" (snail), "lady-cow" (
ladybird), "crizzle" (to crisp) and "throstle" (
song thrush).
Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) has been identified as a
Lincolnshire poet, while
Philip Larkin (1922–1985) is principally associated with the
city of Hull.
Basil Bunting's (1900–1985) semi-autobiographal poem
Briggflatts can be read as a meditation on the limits of life and a celebration of
Northumbrian culture and dialect, as symbolised by events and figures like the doomed Viking King
Eric Bloodaxe. ==Ondaatje Prize==