Waverley Books
This is a title in an inexpensive range of classics in the "Penguin Popular Classics" series.
Guy Mannering is an astrologer who only half-believes in his art. Instead he places his faith in patriarchal power, wealth and social position. But the Scotland of this novel is a nation in which the old hierarchies are breaking down and Guy must learn the limits of the nabob's authority in a society in which each social group—from gypsies and smugglers, to Edinburgh lawyers, landowners and Border store farmers—lives by its own laws. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Jonathan Oldbuck is an amateur historian, archaeologist and collector of items of dubious antiquity. While taking a coach from Edinburgh, he meets young Mr. William Lovel, who is interested as he is in antiquities. When Oldbuck introduces Lovel to his neighbor Sir Arthur Wardour and his family, Lovel falls in love with Sir Arthur's daughter Isabella. Together, all of them go to the ancient ruins of Saint Ruth on Sir Arthur's property to look for an ancient treasure that Oldbuck believes to be buried at the ruins. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet. He was the first modern English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime and many of his works remain classics of British literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.
When young Francis Osbaldistone discovers that his vicious and scheming cousin Rashleigh has designs both on his father's business and his beloved Diana Vernon, he turns in desperation to Rob Roy for help. Chieftain of the MacGregor clan, Rob Roy is a brave and fearless man, able and cunning. But he is also an outlaw with a price on his head, and as he and Francis join forces to pursue Rashleigh, he is constantly aware that he, too, is being pursued—and could be captured at any moment. Set on the eve of the 1715 Jacobite uprising, Rob Roy brilliantly evokes a Scotland on the verge of rebellion, blending historical fact and a novelist's imagination to create an incomparable portrait of intrigue, rivalry and romance. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
The story of Wilfred of Ivanhoe has thrilled audiences since it was first conceived in the early 19th Century. Set in 1194 at the end of the Third Crusade, Sir Walter Scott's novel also contains appearances by Sir Robin of Locksley and his Merry Men. Ray Lago's background in action-packed comics makes him a great choice to draw this epic tale.
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The course of life to which Mary and her little retinue were doomed, was in the last degree secluded and lonely, varied only as the weather permitted or rendered impossible the Queen's usual walk in the garden, or on the battlements. -from The Abbot They were the literary phenomenon of their time: The Waverly novels, 48 volumes set in fanciful re-creations of the Scottish Highlands (and other lands) of centuries past, published between 1814 and 1831 and devoured by a reading public hungry for these sweeping, interconnected melodramas. The series popularized historical fiction, though they're also abundant in astute political and social commentary. The Abbot, Volume 21 of Waverly, follows directly on from The Monastery (Vol. 18) and features a vividly depicted Mary Queen of Scots during the time of her imprisonment at Lochleven Castle. Scottish novelist and poet SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), a literary hero of his native land, turned to writing only when his law practice and printing business foundered. Among his most beloved works are The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rob Roy (1818), and Ivanhoe (Waverly Vols. 16 and 17) (1820).
The tragic story of the secret marriage of Amy Robsart to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite and potential consort of the Queen, is imbued with the drama of Tudor England, its exuberance of spirit, vigor of language, violence and treachery, ostentation and gaiety, shifts and stratagems, and above all, its pervading sense of transience. Steeped in and engrossed by historic England, Scott relished the opportunity to create a pageant of Elizabethan life. From the swashbuckling Lambourne to the Machiavellian Varney, from the vacillating Leicester to Amy and the Queen herself, Scott grasps something of the passions of Marlowe, the histrionics of Kyd and the cynicism of Marston. Kenilworth comes as close to the theatrical and the melodramatic as Rob Roy or The Bride of Lammermoor, and Scott's sheer zest in writing is there for any reader to enjoy.
This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a 1846 edition by Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig.
Set at the end of the reign of James VI and I, The Fortunes of Nigel sits among Walter Scott’s richest creations in political insight, range of characterisation and linguistic virtuosity.Well versed in the political literature of the period, Scott drew a detailed picture of London in the early 17th century while charting the effects of Scottish influx into the English capital: the ambitions and fears of the incomers and the suspicion they aroused. The complex web of political (and sexual) intrigue, and especially of all-important financial dealings and double-dealings, is traced with a master’s hand.No Scott novel has a more memorable cast of characters. King James heads them, with his childish irresponsibility and elusive character: a would-be Solomon and father of his country, theological disputant, prurient bisexual. But not far behind are jeweller George Heriot, clockmaker Davie Ramsay, courtier Sir Mungo Malagrowther, servant Richie Moniplies and many vivid minor characters. Steeped in Jacobean drama, this tale shows Scott revelling in the linguistic riches of the age. Previous editions have obscured his virtuosity (as seen in a dazzlingly proto-Joycean monologue by a Greenwich barber), but painstaking examination of the manuscript and proofs for this new edition allows the full vigour of Scott’s achievement to be savoured for the first time.
‘Here is a plot without a drop of blood; and all the elements of a romance, without its conclusion’, comments the King towards the end of Scott’s longest, and arguably most intriguing, novel. Set against the backdrop of the Popish Plot to overturn Charles II, Peveril of the Peak explores the on-going tensions between Cavalier and Puritan loyalties during the fraught years of Restoration England. Ranging from Derbyshire to the Isle of Man and culminating in London it is a novel which interweaves political intrigue, personal responsibilities and the ways in which the forces of history are played out in the struggles of individual human lives. But its true subject is perhaps the role of narration and the limits of storytelling itself. In this, the first scholarly edition of Peveril , Alison Lumsden recovers a lost novel.
The scene of this romance is laid in the fifteenth century, when the feudal system, which had been the sinews and nerves of national defence, and the spirit of chivalry, by which, as by a vivifying soul, that system was animated, began to be innovated upon and abandoned by those grosser characters who centred their sum of happiness in procuring the personal objects on which they had fixed their own exclusive attachment.
Meg Dods, a sentimental virago, keeps a rundown inn in a derelict Tweedale village, while the young Laird is living way beyond his means. When a nearby spring becomes a Spa, life changes as a hotel and a troop of social climbers move in. But this is not a tale of antique virtue giving way to decadent ostentation: although the gang at the ‘Well’ dance the seven deadly sins, everyone in the book has feet of clay.
Set in the mid-eighteenth century in the fictitious third Jacobite rebellion, Redgauntlet (1824) tells of Darsie Latimer, a student of law who becomes embroiled in a plot to put Prince Charles Edward (aka, Bonnie Prince Charlie) on the British throne. The events in Redgauntlet never actually took place, but they are probable, and form the culmination of Scott's series of Jacobite novels.
Now, if to these were added the diverse reall phantasms seen at Whitehall in Cromwell’s times, which caused him to keep such mighty guards in and about his bedchamber, and yet so oft to change his lodgings; if those things done at St. James’, where the devil so joal’d the centinels against the sides of the queen’s chappell doors, that some of them fell sick upon it; and others, not, taking warning by it, kild one outright, whom they buried in the place; and all other such dreadful things, those that inhabited the royal houses have been affrighted with.
Anne of Geierstein (1829) is set in Central Europe in the fifteenth century, but it is a remarkably modern novel, for the central issues are the political instability and violence that arise from the mix of peoples and the fluidity of European boundaries. With Anne of Geierstein Scott concludes the unfinished historical business of Quentin Durward, working on a larger canvas with broader brush-strokes and generally with more sombre colours. The novel illustrates the darkening of Scott's historical vision in the final part of his career. It is also a remarkable manifestation of the way in which the scope of his imaginative vision continued to expand even as his physical powers declined. This new edition is based upon the first edition but is corrected by recovering from the manuscript about 2000 readings lost in some cases by misreadings of what Scott had written, but in many others from the assumption that those who processed Scott's text knew better than he did. This is the first modern critical edition of what was in its day a remarkably successful novel.
The island of Malta is key to the control of the central Mediterranean Sea. For five months in 1561 a Turkish force attacked Malta--and was defied, in a great epic of endurance, by the Knights of St. John. Sir Walter Scott visited the island a year before his death, and gathered material to write a novel about it, dying before it was complete. Now S. Fowler Wright has finished Scott's last great historical romance. This is a story of high courage and deep faith. At its centre stands the old Grand Master of the Order, La Vallette (after whom Valetta was named), grim and unshakeable. But it is also a story of love undaunted amid fearful perils; of a girl who, rather than be separated from the man she loves, learns to wield a sword, and, escaping by a hairsbreadth from the clutches of the infidel, finally wins even the Grand Master's grudging admiration. Here is a novel to stir the blood and stimulate the imagination.