Ffeil B2/2. - Lucy Penny letters to Mary Casey (2)

Lucy Amelia Powys (1890-1986) was the youngest of the eleven children of the Rev. C. F. Powys, vicar of Montacute, Somerset, and Mary Cowper Johnson; her siblings included the writers John Cowper Powys, Theodore Francis Powys, and Llewelyn Powys. She married Hounsell Penny, a miller, in 1911 and they had one daughter, Mary (b. 1915). The family lived at Horsebridge, Hampshire, before moving to Shootash, Hampshire, in 1938. Hounsell Penny died in 1945 and later that year Mary married Gerard Casey. In 1950 Lucy moved to Mappowder, Dorset, to be near her brother Theodore. She was joined there in the nineteen seventies by Mary and Gerard, who lived in the cottage next door until Mary's death in 1980. Lucy Penny died in November 1986.

Phyllis Playter was born in 1894 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Canadian-American parents. She first met John Cowper Powys in March 1921 during a lecture tour of the United States and subsequently became Powys's long-term companion from 1923 until his death forty years later. Herself a gifted writer and poet, Playter's own career was largely subsumed in that of Powys's, upon whose work she nevertheless exerted significant influence. In his letters and diaries Powys commonly refers to Playter as 'the T.T.' (the 'Tiny Thin' or 'The Tao'). Following Powys's death in 1963, Playter continued to live in their last home at 1 Waterloo, Blaenau Ffestiniog, until her own death in 1982.