Stanley Weyman

Gebundenes Buch

Under the Red Robe

Beschreibung

There were a score round us when the fool, little knowing the man with whom he had to deal, and as little how to lose like a gentleman, flung the words in my teeth. He thought, I'll be sworn, that I should storm and swear and ruffle it like any common cock of the hackle. But that was never Gil de Berault's way. For a few seconds after he had spoken I did not even look at him. I passed my eye instead - smiling, Bien Entendu - round the ring of waiting faces, saw that there was no one except De Pombal I had cause to fear; and then at last I rose and looked at the fool with the grim face I have known impose on older and wiser men. 'Marked cards, M. l'Anglais?' I said, with a chilling sneer. 'They are used, I am told, to trap players - not unbirched schoolboys.'

Autor

Stanley John Weyman (1855 - 1928) was an English writer of historical romance. His most popular works were written in 1890-1895 and set in late 16th and early 17th-century France. While very successful at the time, they are now largely forgotten. Weyman in his day was immensely popular and admired by Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde. Works like The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas had established a market for popular historical fiction and it was a crowded field. Contemporary rivals included Baroness Orczy, A. E. W. Mason, John Buchan and Rafael Sabatini. The biographer Reginald Pound grouped Weyman with Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy L. Sayers and Somerset Maugham as Strand writers. He is now perhaps the least familiar of all these. His greatest success came before 1895 (Under the Red Robe, A Gentleman of France and The Red Cockade) and he stopped writing entirely between 1908 and 1919. His style and focus are more typical of Victorian writers. Weyman's strength lies in historical detail, often in less familiar areas. The Long Night is based on the Duke of Savoy's attempt to storm Geneva in December 1602, an event still celebrated annually in a festival called L'Escalade. Weyman received an award from the city for his research. The financial security of early success allowed him to choose subjects of personal interest. Some had less general appeal, such as the 1832 Reform Bill (treated in Chippinge), post-1815 industrialisation (Starvecrow Farm) or the 1825 financial crisis (Ovington's Bank, reprinted in 2012 and 2015 on the back of a similar crisis in 2008). Weyman called his own books "pleasant fables" and was aware of their modest literary value.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: 1st World Library - Literary Society
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: Februar 2006
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 222mm x 145mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 509g
• ISBN-13: 9781421803890
• ISBN-10: 1421803895
• Artikelnr.: 20964770