John Cowper Powys’ relationship with the landscapes of Dorset and Somerset is explored in strange and diverse ways through the ‘Wessex novels’: Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Weymouth Sands (1934) and Maiden Castle (1936). The first three were written during Powys’ time in the United States, and this chapter focuses upon them, along with After My Fashion (1919), in examining the specific influence of his peripatetic, cosmopolitan existence upon the development of his distinctive literary style. Like Lawrence, Powys is ambivalent, at best, towards the developments of modernity: both writers share an opposition towards the increasing urbanisation of human life in the early twentieth century, and the mechanisation of transport and industry. I will argue, however, that Powys’ novels tend to ironise such concerns to some extent, recognising the ambiguities of modernity in terms of its potential epistemological benefits. Powys is aware of the problematic character of any attempt to assert essentialist notions of identity and rootedness in an environment. Despite the intensely nostalgic affection for Dorset and Somerset that we find in his works, there is an ever-present recognition that our sense of place is always a dreamlike, imaginative creation – the result of an active process – rather than some kind of authentic mode of belonging, passively absorbed from a chthonic essence. Consequently Powys emphasises the values of movement, marginality, liminality and comedy: his novels are not tragic narratives of human struggles to belong, but jumbled, bathetic, and ‘atmospheric’ worlds that deliberately lack a strong sense of linear direction. They engage with perspectival developments of modernity, suggesting a cosmopolitan diversity (in various forms) within the English landscape, and thus represent a distinctively rural form of modernism, the innovations of which lie primarily in structure, narrative style, and atmosphere.