Writer
J. B. Priestley comments: "Even if Powys had never written any novels – and at least one of them,
A Glastonbury Romance is a masterpiece – this one book alone would have proved him to be a writer of genius." While he sets out to be frank about himself, and especially his sexual peculiarities and perversions, he largely excludes any substantial discussion of the women in his life. It has become clear that the reason for this is because it was written while he was still married to Margaret Lyon though he was living in a permanent relationship with the American Phyllis Playter. Morine Krissdotir, in
The Life of Powys, describes the first chapter of the
Autobiography as "one of the most complex and beautifully sustained pieces of prose about early childhood", but notes that "there is something distinctly odd about it" because there is no mention of his mother, who "is never mentioned in the entire
Autobiography." Herbert Williams comments that the exclusion of most of the important women in Powys's life "makes
Autobiography, for all its power and candour, a curiously distorted account of himself". Novelist
Margaret Drabble describes it as "one of the most eccentric memoirs ever written", and notes that Powys took "
Pepys,
Casanova and
Rousseau as his models, in his earlier autobiographical work,
Confessions of Two Brothers, and that
Autobiography has justly been compared to the
Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau." Drabble adds that
Autobiography rivals these earlier autobiographies "in its frankness and its evasions, in its inconsistency and its emotional intensity, in its egoism and its self-abasement". Powys also alludes in
Confessions of Two Brothers to the autobiographical writing of
Goethe,
Montaigne,
Saint Augustine, and
Oscar Wilde.
J. B. Priestley, in his "Introduction" to the 1967 Macdonald reprint, also refers to the fact that "Its author is astonishingly frank about himself, confessing all manner of aberrations and absurdities." Critic C. A. Coates suggests that "It is not a chronological account of his sixty years [...] chapters are blocks of land seized upon and described" ranging from Powys's birthplace in
Shirley, Derbyshire, to
Dorchester, Dorset, where his novel
Maiden Castle is set, to his childhood in
Montacute, Somersetshire, not far from
Glastonbury, to his marriage and living in Sussex, to the many years he lived and lectured in America. It is, however, according to Coates, "impossible to visualize an incident [in
Autobiography] without also remembering not its 'setting', but what Powys's emotional, sensuous attitude to that environment was at the time". The
diaries of John Cowper Powys, kept from 1929, several of which have been published, are a source of further autobiographical material, along with numerous published and unpublished letters. In 1965
Marie Canavaggia received the Prix Gustave Le Métais – Larivière of the
French Academy for her translation of the
Autobiography (
Autobiographie, Gallimard). It has also been translated into German, and Swedish. ==See also==