Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1989, this novel combines aspects of romance fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy to freshen the telling of a double set of complex relationships. Reminiscent of The French Lieutenant’s Woman by… Read More ›
The five volumes in this series include Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). Taking the series as a whole, critics rank this work as among the… Read More ›
Awarded the Booker Prize for 2000, this novel is an example of both postmodernism and feminism and includes elements of science fiction in a complex, multilayered plot rooted in the traditions of realism. The first-person narrator, Iris Chase Griffen, writes… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott published his 17th-century-setting romance Woodstock, or the Cavalier, a Tale of the Year 1651 using his traditional approach to historical fiction. He identified an era that caught his interest for political and/or social movements, creating a heroic… Read More ›
A Robin Hood figure, the factual individual named Rob Roy, formed the basis for Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction Rob Roy. The real Rob Roy (literally “Red Robert,” for his red hair) was a drover who became an outlaw, leading… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott has long been acknowledged as the first writer of historical fiction, and when he chose Scotland as a setting, he generally produced his best work. He introduced this approach in his first novel, Waverley (1814), when he… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward was one of three novels Scott issued in 1823. The first edition was printed in 10,000 copies, the sheets carried in bales by steamship to London on May 16, 1823, where binders worked the night… Read More ›
John Galt had written four Scottish regional stories for William Blackwood’s Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine before he published his fifth, The Provost, in that journal. The series boosted Galt’s reputation beyond that of a writer of biographies, articles, travel books, and… Read More ›
Of Anthony Hope’s many short stories and various novels, The Prisoner of Zenda remains his best known and enjoyed, praised by contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson, followed by its less successful sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898). The novel offers… Read More ›
When Sir Walter Scott published the second in his Tales of My Landlord series in 1816, Old Mortality quickly became a favorite of his reading public. The novel focuses on the month of June 1679, with Scott compressing time to… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott introduced the modern novel to the Western world with his publication of Waverley (1814) and invented the subgenre of historical fiction known as the historical novel, which, in the words of David Daiches, would “show history and… Read More ›
Robert Louis Stevenson found himself attracted to the subject matter of his novel The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale due to his interest in the years following Jacobite Scotland’s 1745 rebellion. He also drew inspiration from Captain Marryat, commenting,… Read More ›
Robert Louis Stevenson continued in the vein of writing adventure stories for boys when he published Kidnapped, first as a serial in a boy’s magazine. However, adults had taken notice of his accomplished style in earlier novels, such as Treasure… Read More ›
In his novel Kenilworth, Sir Walter Scott tells his romanticized version of the death of Amy Robsart, wife to Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, favored by Queen Elizabeth I. Set in 1560, the novel seeks to, as Scott writes… Read More ›
Anna Marie Porter’s novel of the French Revolutionary War, The Hungarian Brothers, proved her most popular romance. It either delighted or repulsed readers in later centuries, depending on their fondness for the genre. One contemporary review of the novel read,… Read More ›
William Makepeace Thackeray achieved his goal of making history familiar to his readers in The History of Henry Esmond. He established a model for historical fiction, using true occurrences as the basis of his novel in a way never done… Read More ›
First published in The Cornhill Magazine from January 1860 through April 1861, Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage was the fourth in his Barsetshire novels sequence. That sequence had opened in 1855 with The Warden and would conclude with The Last Chronicle… Read More ›
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
A fiction subgenre of a realistic nature that focuses on the home scene, domestic realism evolved from the reaction against Romanticism that occurred in the mid-19th century. Following the preoccupation of the Romantic writers (1789–1837) with the superiority of intuition… Read More ›
Charles Reade’s popular historical romance, The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages, represented the labor of two years. Reade was hired in 1859 by the publishers of Once a Week to help that periodical compete with… Read More ›
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