About the Author:
Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771. Educated for the law, he obtained the office of sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire in 1799 and in 1806 the office of clerk of session, a post whose duties he fulfilled for some twenty-five years. His lifelong interest in Scottish antiquity and the ballads which recorded Scottish history led him to try his hand at narrative poems of adventure and action. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810) made his reputation as one of the leading poets of his time. A novel, Waverley, which he had begun in 1805, was published anonymously in 1814. Subsequent novels appeared with the note “by the author of Waverley”; hence his novels often are called collectively “the Waverley novels.” Some of the most famous of these are Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), and Quentin Durward (1823). In recognition of his literary work Scott was made a baronet in 1819. During his last years he held various official positions and published biographies, editions of Swift and Dryden, tales, lyric poetry, and various studies of history and antiquity. He died in 1832.
Review:
Yet another triumph in this marvellous series. Here are six English-language novels which I think great and which I do come back to. They all pass an essential test: that with each reading you find something new in them, and so they never exhaust what they have to say ... Redgauntlet, a warm and wonderfully relaxed novel celebrating, among other things, friendship, is also a penetrating psychological study of attachment to a lost cause. -- Allan Massie Yet another triumph in this marvellous series. Here are six English-language novels which I think great and which I do come back to. They all pass an essential test: that with each reading you find something new in them, and so they never exhaust what they have to say ... Redgauntlet, a warm and wonderfully relaxed novel celebrating, among other things, friendship, is also a penetrating psychological study of attachment to a lost cause.
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