I am reading Robert Hugh Benson’s early novel By What Authority? One of RBH’s strong suits as a novelist is his graceful employment of an extraordinarily wide vocabulary: his use of […]
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Category: Walter Scott
Firmly I Believe and Truly
This anecdote about Walter Scott, otherwise unknown to me, is extracted from the writings of Mary Josephine “Maisie” Ward 1889-1975, who had the signal honour to be the great-great-granddaughter of […]
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Anne of Geierstein or The Daughter of the Mist
Many readers do not like Anne of Geierstein (1829). Schoolchildren who were obliged to read it are said to have been turned many readers off Walter Scott’s novels altogether. I […]
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Jasper Dryfesdale (“The Abbot”)
Walter Scott’s 1820 novel, The Abbot, has fared rather better with critics than with the reading public. I am one amateur critic who also likes it, although I would not […]
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A Legend of the Wars of Montrose by Walter Scott
Why do most commentators undervalue Sir Walter Scott’s short novel, A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (1819)? I wonder if it is not because of the Catholic sympathy he […]
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The Black Dwarf (second and final part)
Having said something about the purpose and possibilities of literature, and introduced Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Black Dwarf, I shall now discuss its contents. 3. The Issues As stated, […]
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The Black Dwarf Part One)
“… fair play and auld (old) Scotland for ever!” The Black Dwarf, chap. 12 The issue at the heart of The Black Dwarf is that of suffering in that word’s […]
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Peveril of the Peak
Despite the near-unanimous modern dislike of Sir Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak, I utterly enjoyed it, and what is more, I have profited. No novelist I know of matches […]
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The Bride of Lammermoor
One well educated person I know considers The Bride of Lammermoor to have been Sir Walter Scott’s greatest novel. I think it is a great novel, and an underestimated one, […]
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