![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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