Ægypt

Ægypt is a sequence of four novels by John Crowley. The work describes the work and life of Pierce Moffett, who prepares a manuscript for publication even as it prepares him for some as-yet unknown destiny, all set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among the Faraway Hills at the border of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Volumes

The four volumes mingle Moffett's real and dream life in America in 1977 (and, in an extended coda, into the early 1980s) with the narrative of the manuscript he is preparing for publication. The manuscript, left unfinished by its author Fellowes Kraft, is an historical fiction that follows the briefly intersecting adventures of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno and of British occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley.

Moffett is trained as a historian, and is under contract to write a popular history covering hermetical themes. Early in the process, he conceives of writing a novel which, it is clear, would be Ægypt; his ruminations on that novel describe the structure of the novel he is in.

The Solitudes (novel)

The Solitudes (Originally titled Ægypt contrary to Crowley's wishes) is a 1987 Modern Fantasy novel by John Crowley. It is Crowley's fifth published novel and the first novel in the four-volume Ægypt Sequence. The novel follows Pierce Moffett, a college history professor in his retreat from ordinary, academic life to pastoral life of Faraway Hills. While in the area, Pierce comes up with a plan to write a book about Hermeticism, in the process finding several parallels with his own project and that of the nearly-forgotten local novelist Fellowes Kraft.

The novel takes place in two time periods and features three main protagonists; that of Pierce's in the late twentieth century, and that of John Dee, Edward Kelley and Giordano Bruno as from the historical novels of Kraft in the Renaissance. The difference is marked stylistically by dashes indicating dialogue for events that happened in the Renaissance and events in the twentieth century marked by dialogue in quotation marks.