His novels were often witty social and political satires and whimsical tales. He wrote 32 novels and collections of short stories throughout his life and the success of Zenda and Hentzau enabled him to leave the legal profession in his late thirties an devote himself to writing full time. Hope himself stood for Parliament in 1882 as a Liberal but did not win. Hope himself was an Oxford-trained barrister who had been a pupil of future British Prime Minister H. Charles Dana Gibson’s frontpiece to the 1898 edition of The Prisoner of Zenda Hope’s stylized adventure stories set off a series of imitators that came to be known as the genre of “Ruritanian romance” –novels set in modern day fictional royal courts with romantic entanglements, murders and double-crossees. The name Ruritania has since become a synonym for a romanticized fictional country full of swashbuckling court intrigues. Hope was a prolific and versatile writer who is known today for two influential adventure novels, The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau.īoth novels are set in the fictional mitteleuropean kingdom of Ruritania. Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, who wrote under the name Anthony Hope was born in London on February 9, 1863.
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