novel by John Cowper Powys, who was a contemporary of Lawrence, was "Dedicated with devoted admiration to the greatest poet and novelist of our age Thomas Hardy". Powys's later novel Maiden Castle (1936) is set in Dorchester, Hardy's Casterbridge, and was intended by Powys to be a "rival" to Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. Maiden Castle is the last of Powys's so-called Wessex novels, Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1932), and Weymouth Sands (1934), which are set in Somerset and Dorset. Hardy was clearly the starting point for the character of the novelist Edward Driffield in W. Somerset Maugham's novel Cakes and Ale (1930). Thomas Hardy's works also feature prominently in the American playwright Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985), in which a graduate thesis analysing Tess of the d'Urbervilles is interspersed with analysis of Matt's family's neuroses. The symphonic poems Mai-Dun by John Ireland (1921) and Egdon Heath by Gustav Holst (1927) evoke the landscape of Hardy's novels. Hardy has been a significant influence on Nigel Blackwell, frontman of the post-punk British rock band Half Man Half Biscuit, who has often incorporated phrases (some obscure) by or about Hardy into his song lyrics. Works Prose In 1912, Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes: Novels of character and environment The Poor Man and the Lady (1867, unpublished and lost) Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1872) Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) The Return of the Native (1878) The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character (1886) The Woodlanders (1887) Wessex Tales (1888, a collection of short stories) Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1891) Life's Little Ironies (1894, a collection of short stories) Jude the Obscure (1895) Romances and fantasies A Pair of Blue Eyes: A Novel (1873) The Trumpet-Major (1880) Two on a Tower: A Romance (1882) A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories) The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892) Novels of ingenuity Desperate Remedies: A Novel (1871) The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters (1876) A Laodicean: A Story of To-day (1881) Other Hardy also produced minor tales; one story, The Spectre of the Real (1894) was written in collaboration with Florence Henniker. An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned