Millions of female readers have burst into tears at the novel’s moving conclusion or male readers stifled a tear and fantasised that, yes, they too would have done the noble thing! Wish-fulfilment Who wouldn’t wish to be the hero who shows such pluck and dash – or the beautiful Princess Flavia who he falls in love with – both of them with so little time together before she nobly submits to her duty and he nobly walks away from their love. It is a strange, beguiling blending of past and present which adds to the fairy tale ambience.ĭashing hero The first person narrator is sometimes a problem for novelists but here it perfectly suits the rather lazy but brave and earnest hero, Rudolf Rassendyll, distant cousin of the king of Ruritania, who suddenly finds himself called upon to impersonate the king who has been kidnapped by his wicked cousin, Black Duke Michael. They telegraph the capital city and catch trains to destinations. In the various fight scenes hero and baddy wield swords for medieval duels, but also have revolvers tucked into their belts.

I think of the kingdom of Syldavia in the Tintin adventure, King Ottakar’s Sceptre.Īncient and Modern Yet in some magical way, this backward kingdom is also plugged into the modern age. He invented the name Ruritania for this relic of an earlier, more decorous and chivalrous age, and the name has endured to describe a backward mid-European fictional setting for swashbuckling adventures. Gothic location by locating in Eastern Europe the book takes advantage of our vague sense that the area is full of the wild forests, romantic courts, medieval towns and castles set on crags which our own boring country lacks.

That success comes from a wonderful combination of themes which produce a short, fast-moving text full of excitement and sensation.

Its spectacular success persuaded Hope to abandon his legal career and become a professional author but none of the reams of novels, essays, stories and plays he produced in the next 40 years recaptured Zenda’s success. A month later the first draft was completed and the book was published in April 1894. The idea of The Prisoner of Zenda came to Hope as he walked back from Westminster Count Court in 28 November 1893, a month before Conan Doyle flung Holmes off the Reichenbach Falls. (Project Gutenberg hosts an impressive number of his works including Zenda.) For fictions was Hope’s real interest – in his spare time he was writing scores of tales, novels and essays. Anthony Hope (1863-1933 ) was posh – son of a public school headmaster, Marlborough, First in Classics at Oxford, called to the Bar in 1887, the year Sherlock Holmes made his debut.

Anthony hope novel the prisoner of