John Masefield is perhaps best known as the poet laureate of England from 1930 until his death in 1967, and his long career as a minor novelist falls under the shadow of his enormously popular poetry. In recent years readers and critics have ignored Masefield's novels, which is unfortunate because his fiction offers an antidote to currently fashionable pessimism and nihilism. In Grace Before Ploughing: Fragments of Autobiography (1966) Masefield claims that early in life he was certain "of spiritual powers ever ready to help bright human endeavour; the certainty that the individual life follows a law from of old, the law of his being, and must obey that law with all that is good in him, and achieve what is good in him, or fail." His twenty-one novels reflect this certainty through the repetition of several important themes: the promotion of an intellectual purity and simplicity, an unswerving faith in...