There was a time when poetry prevailed in consideration over prose. Walter Scott He dreamed of being an ingenious poet, but he dedicated himself to reconciling waiting for lyrical muses with writing novels, a task for which he finally had to admit that he was more gifted, after years of hiding his identity as the creator of his most popular prose . Wanting to be a writer also has its contradictions ...
Walter Scott participated in the romanticism of his time, late XNUMXth century and early XNUMXth century. And he applied that romantic revision of the world in historical novels loaded with epic and idealism. Just what the general reading public longed for in those days: intense stories of glory and tragedy, of disputes in all areas, in the personal sphere or against social injustice.
The truth is that in order not to want to write prose, good old Scott ended up paving the way for a genre that today harvests bestsellers everywhere: the historical novel.
Walter Scott was one of the first to combine real events with the vicissitudes of invented personalities that surround them. From Walter Scott to Ken follet everything has been a variation to infinity of the same point of origin. And the trick of the historical fiction genre continues to have a romantic point that moves the characters who trace the intrahistory turned into a plot, with the corresponding historical period as a background.
So if you are a regular reader of historical novels, you should know that you are in debt to Sir Walter Scott.
Recommended novels by Walter Scott
Ivanhoe
Almost every house in the world has a copy of this novel lost on the shelves. A world-class classic whose echoes seem to resonate in later works by great writers such as Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo. An entertaining story that at the same time recovers the great idealized values.
Summary: Ivanhoe recounts the bitter struggle of a man to reestablish his good name and incidentally that of the crown. The action takes place in a turbulent time, in times of crusades, of fierce struggles between two peoples once united, the Saxon and the Norman, and Prince John without Land plans to crown himself king, taking advantage of the fact that Richard the Lionheart is fighting in the Crusades. .
Ricardo will need the help of a brave and knowledgeable knight on the battlefield, and that will be Wilfred of Ivanhoe. Walter Scott stood out thanks to novels like Ivanhoe as one of the great authors of historical narrative of his time.
Eternal mortality
Being a romantic writer required a commitment to the spiritual and to the inhuman, alienation and abuse of power. Telling a romantic story but addressing these issues with an almost pedagogical intention and at the same time offering an interesting novel is not an easy task. In this case it is more than achieved.
Summary: "Eternal Mortality" for many, Walter Scott's best novel, is a vivid and pathetic chronicle of the problematic ubiquity of value. In Scotland in 1679, the assassination of an archbishop unleashes the threads of a long-hatched civil war. In between, an intrepid and enthusiastic young man, Henry Morton, finds himself embroiled in a conflict of loyalties.
Rob Roy
When a writer finds a lost cause, or rather abandoned or distorted by the passage of time, he may consider that it is fair to undertake redress through literature.
The honor of the real character Robert McGregor is at stake, and the story has that point of energetic denunciation of amorality that manages to triumph by staining the name of whoever gets ahead of it.
Summary: Narrated by Frank Osbaldistone, the son of an English merchant who first traveled to the north of England, and later to the Scottish Highlands to collect a stolen debt from his father. Frank Osbaldistone, heir to a London business house, will have to face his evil cousin Rasleigh, over the dispute over his father's business and the love of Diana Vernon. Robert McGregor was an XNUMXth century Scottish hero.
His financial problems, which force him to borrow money from the Marquis de Montrose, and a host of adversities make him an outlaw who only the love of his wife will give him strength to face everything.
