Wolf Solent is a novel by John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) that was written while he was based in Patchin Place, New York City, and travelling around the US as a lecturer.

[12] In the Preface he wrote for the 1961 Macdonald edition of the novel Powys states: "Wolf Solent is a book of Nostalgia, written in a foreign country with the pen of a traveller and the ink-blood of his home.

[14] While Powys had been born in Shirley, Derbyshire and lived there for this first seven years of his life, his father then returned to his home county of Dorset, and, after a brief stay in Weymouth, the family resided in Dorchester from May 1880 until the Christmas of 1885.

[18] This follows the loss of his job as a history teacher in London, following an outburst in class in which “he found himself pouring forth a torrent of wild, indecent invective upon every aspect of modern civilization”.

[25] Peter Easingwood suggests, that “[u]nderlying ‘’Wolf Solent’’ is a sensuous-mystical feeling for the natural world that goes with an attempted rejection of human society”.

[30] Or, as another writer suggests: "The landscape and the emotional intimacies of his relationships in Dorset manage to attack [Wolf’s] inner life as no physical or personal contact in London had done".

[33] By the end of the novel Wolf realizes that he and his wife Gerda have little in common and "that he has confused love with 'a mixture of lust and romance'", and that he should have married Christie Malakite.

[39] According to Robert Timlin however, "Once its significance in the context of the book as a whole is understood, for Powys to end with Wolf planning to have a cup of tea can be regarded as neither an example of bathos nor an arbitrary decision but an entirely appropriate finish.

"[40] An important recurring image in the novel is that of the face on the steps of Waterloo Station in London, which precipitates Wolf's emotion collapse in front of his history class, and loss of his job.

[60] In a letter to his brother Llewelyn, written from Chicago on 18 February 1925, in which Powys mentions working on Wolf Solent, he refers to a beggar that he had seen with "a 'shocking' face".

[61] Professor Peter Easingwood suggests that from this encounter came the idea for the face which forms such a "dominant pattern of symbolic imagery" in the novel.

She also records that "in an ironic twist, the steps [of the Victory Arch] soon became a place where beggars, many of them mentally and physically crippled ex-servicemen, gathered".

More recently, also in The Spectator, A. N. Wilson wrote: "The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Jobber Skald (also published as Weymouth Sands, 1935) and Maiden Castle (1937) — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language.

However, Wilson also notes that "this kind of writing is not going to appeal to every reader", and John Cowper Powys "has been expunged from the canon of English literature.