Analysis of Maurice Hewlett’s The Forest Lovers

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 3, 2025

The Forest Lovers was the first of several romance novels by Maurice Hewlett, who began writing of knights in medieval settings at a time when such books were at the height of popularity. He prepared readers for all the hallmarks of such fiction as he began Chapter I, titled “Prosper Le Gai Rides Out.” Inserting himself into the tale in an example of authorial intervention, Hewlett announces of his story, “Blood will be spilt, virgins suffer distresses; the horn will sound through woodland glades; dogs, wolves, deer and men, Beauty and the Beasts, will tumble each other, seeking life or death with their proper tools. There should be mad work, not devoid of entertainment.” He holds true to his promise, offering much in the way of enjoyable, if predictable, reading.

As the title of the first chapter indicates, the novel’s protagonist, Prosper Le Gai, hears the call of destiny and leaves home to seek adventure. Son of the dead Baron Jocelyn, and turned out of his own home by his brother, Malise, Baron of Starning and Parrox, Prosper departs during the month of September, with the time of harvest serving as a symbol of an important stage in the young knight’s life. Readers will gather from the novel’s title and also from his symbolic name that Prosper will find romance, of both the spiritual and romantic types. In a paradox, Hewlett couples images of the forest, long a symbol of hidden danger, with that of love, suggesting the love will be gained with difficulty.

Prosper sets off toward Morgraunt, a country “spoken of in a whisper,” “deep . . . dark as night, haunted with the waving of perpetual woods […] a mystery.” There he will encounter early on the requisite resistance to his presence by bandits, allowing him to vanquish them in an easy victory.

His adventures with women, whom he claims to pay little notice, prove more difficult. First he meets a mysterious tall lady who asks his aid in burying a man she claims attacked her, then died in the middle of their struggle. Later, Prosper will encounter the equally mysterious Isoult, of unknown parentage, called La Desirous. While her name indeed suggests an object of fleshly desire, as a character points out to La Desirous, it actually means that she desires, not that others should desire her. However, her beauty and association with woodspeople cause the local authorities to label her a witch, and her life is in danger from the scheming Abbey of Saint Giles of Holy Thorn. He convinces the twice-widowed Countess Isabel, Lady of Morgraunt, to allow him to execute local undesirables, including Isoult.

Readers learn early on that the so-called witch is actually Isabel’s only child, removed from her shortly after her birth in a first secret marriage to a man later killed by Isabel’s second husband-to-be. When Prosper rescues a female snow-white pigeon from attack by birds of prey, then learns from a local seer named Alice that she had a dream featuring a similar scene, Hewlett clearly signals the reader that Prosper will be called upon to save at least one fair damsel in distress. Because Prosper has made clear his lack of interest in women, readers also understand that he will have to learn to love the woman he rescues. That woman is Isoult.

In order to rescue Isoult from a fate even worse than execution—marriage to a despicable abbot—Prosper marries her himself. Because he considers her only a child, he leaves her in a convent to be raised by nuns. However, secret identities will later be revealed and, as the opening promised, blood spilled in the name of religious corruption and aristocratic deceit. Isoult is kidnapped and Prosper will encounter various conflicts as he honors God in “fair works,” eventually battling the bully Galors in a detailed knightly combat on horseback. An unplanned revenge of his father’s death and a realization by Lady Isabel, the woman Prosper had aided in the woods, all contribute to a satisfying conclusion.

Reunited with Isoult, whom Galors would have claimed as his own, Prosper discovers they had met before, when, as a youth, he accompanied his father on a hunt and one of their birds of prey had attacked Isoult—then a small child—whom he rescued. Thus, he understands that destiny had reunited the two, as the seer’s vision predicted, and that he is fated to reunite Isoult with her mother.

A satisfying example of the romance genre, The Forest Lovers is not widely read. However, it should be reintroduced to aficionados of medieval tales of knights and their lovers.