In the Library
Waverley
Sir Walter Scott, 1814
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 14 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 82
- Length
- Length 200k words
£1.99
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the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced.
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If you like this, try
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott
Scott does the same thing five hundred years earlier, Saxon against Norman, but with tournaments and greenwood outlaws where Waverley has elegy for a dying world.
£1.99
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Cooper was hailed as the American Scott, and his frontier romance does the same thing with a vanishing people, its last chief standing for a world history is erasing.
£1.99
The Betrothed
Alessandro Manzoni
Manzoni built Italy's national novel straight out of Scott's method, but sets two ordinary villagers, not a gentleman volunteer, against famine, plague and Spanish rule.
£1.99
About the book
Sixty years before he wrote it, an army of Highlanders came down out of the glens behind a Stuart prince and very nearly took a kingdom. Scott had grown up among people who remembered it. Into that world he sends Edward Waverley, an English officer with a head full of old romances, who rides north on leave, falls in with a clan chief and his unbending sister, and finds himself charging at Prestonpans under a plaid he was not born to wear. The ache of the book is that Scott loves both sides and knows one of them is already finished. He published it anonymously, and for years was known only as the Author of Waverley. Every historical novel since has worked the way this one does, holding one small life against a public catastrophe, letting a reader feel how fast a whole way of living can go without anyone hearing it go.