Ivanhoe

Five champions lie unhorsed in the dust at Ashby before anyone learns the name of the stranger who put them there. He is Wilfred of Ivanhoe, home from the Crusades in disguise, disinherited by his own father for loving the wrong woman and following the wrong king. Walter Scott builds the whole of England around that hidden face: Saxon lords still nursing their grudge generations after the Conquest, Robin Hood loose in the greenwood, Richard the Lionheart wandering his own kingdom incognito. But the truest heart of the book isn't the joust. It's the woman who nurses Ivanhoe's wound in secret and is condemned to burn for it: Rebecca, a Jewish physician's daughter, wiser and braver than every knight in these pages, who asks nothing in return. Scott gives her the trial by combat and the rescue, then, quietly, gives Ivanhoe to someone else. All that pageantry, and the wound that never quite closes is hers.