Anthony Hope is the main founder of the
Ruritanian romance genre; his best-known book is The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).
Taking a short break from Stella Benson and
Living Alone to refresh my memory and produce something to mark the occasion
has been a great relief. Unlike the Stella Benson material, The Prisoner of
Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau have no disturbing associations; they
don’t stir up painful and depressing memories or give rise to horrible ideas.
On the other hand, the Zenda stories don’t
contain the sort of material that generates investigations and commentary; they
have no witches or magic in them, although they are fantasy of a kind.
The basic biographical information available,
most of which can be found in Anthony Hope’s Wiki entry, is not very relevant
either.
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins was an English
gentleman. He and his swashbuckling adventure stories have some similarities with John Buchan and his works. Both men had brief legal careers before they started
writing for example.
John Buchan however has inspired several
articles, while the Zenda books seem no more significant this time around than
they did when I first read them. They have only entertainment and escape to
offer, and much of the magic has gone.
There is one however one statement in The
Prisoner of Zenda that seems worth quoting:
“I had
already developed one attribute of royalty—a feeling that I need not reveal all
my mind or my secret designs even to my intimate friends.”
Surely this is an attribute of all sensible
people!
Just as I would rather read Buchan’s
Thirty-Nine Steps than watch any of the films based on the book, I much prefer the Prisoner of Zenda book to the many film adaptions it inspired.
The fictitious central European country of Ruritania
has also inspired many imitations and parodies, including Violet Needham’s
Stormy Petrel stories with their Kingdom of Flavonia and the Marx Brothers’
film Duck Soup with its fictitious countries of Freedonia and Sylvania. Both the
books and the film are very high on my lists of favourites.
John Buchan’s House of the Four Winds (1935) is
a Ruritanian romance. This too may have been inspired by The Prisoner of Zenda:
it is set in the fictitious central European country of Evallonia.
Just like Buchan’s books, the two Zenda novels are still in print even though they can now be read at no cost on
Project Gutenberg.
Just like Buchan’s books, the Zenda novels have
been published in many different editions with covers of varying attractiveness
and relevance to the story.
An autographed picture of Anthony Hope and
some attractive covers:
