T.F. Powys was a writer of short stories in that period between 1920 and 1940 when some of the finest short stories in English were written in England and the United States by such acknowledged masters as D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walter de la Mare, Ernest Hemingway, and A. E. Coppard. These writers--and Powys--extended the short story as an art form beyond the range even of Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, and Henry James. With the novels Mr. Weston's Good Wine (1927) and Unclay (1931), with the collection of stories called Fables (1929) (republished as No Painted Plumage), and with a dozen or so stories scattered through other collections, he produced a group of unassailable masterpieces of intrinsic excellence and unique character.

Powys was in Hardy country; indeed, he knew Hardy personally. The critic F. R. Leavis wrote of their literary connection, "We may take Mr. T. F...