South Wind was published by Martin Secker in 1917 and became a cult classic — never a mass bestseller but continuously in print and admired by a devoted readership that included D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and Elizabeth David. The novel is set on Nepenthe (a fictional Mediterranean island that is transparently Capri) and follows Bishop Doyle Doyle, an Anglican clergyman returning from Africa to England, who is delayed on the island and gradually seduced — not sexually but philosophically — by its atmosphere.
The island’s community is a gallery of eccentrics: a Catholic priest who drinks, a Russian duchess who believes in miracles, an American millionaire building a villa, a classics scholar obsessed with local antiquities, a dissolute count who discourses brilliantly on everything, and various other exiles, remittance men, and escapees from northern respectability. They talk — endlessly, wittily, persuasively — and their conversation, combined with the southern wind (the sirocco, which disturbs minds and loosens morals), slowly dismantles the bishop’s English Protestant certainties.
Douglas’s method is conversational: the novel advances not through plot (almost nothing happens) but through the accumulation of arguments, stories, anecdotes, and philosophical positions that undermine the bishop’s moral framework. By the novel’s end, he witnesses a murder — and finds himself unable to condemn it. The south wind has done its work: the moral absolutism with which he arrived has dissolved into a Mediterranean relativism that accommodates everything, even violence.
Collecting South Wind
First edition (Martin Secker, London, 1917): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$350
- First edition without jacket: $20–$50
- Limited signed edition (1929, Argonaut Press): $80–$200
- US first (Dodd, Mead, 1918): $20–$50