Chronicles of the Canongate is unique among Scott's works as it is his only collection of shorter fiction. It contains his best-known tales, 'The Highland Widow' and 'The Two Drovers', and a third, less well known but of startling originality, 'The Surgeon's Daughter'. The three are set within the framing narrative of Chrystal Croftangry, an old bankrupt with pretensions to literature, who must inevitably be seen as a portrait of the artist facing up to his own insolvency in 1826. Tales in a framework have a long ancestry in European and Oriental literature, and in Chronicles of the Canongate Scott adapts the genre with consummate skill. Each of the stories and Croftangry's narrative may be read independently, but together they constitute a themed work in which the narrator treats of the cultural conflicts in the new Britain and its growing empire in the thirty years from 1756. This edition of Chronicles of the Canongate recovers a truly inventive work which is here republished in its original form for only the second time since Scott's death in 1832

Castle Dangerous is the realisation of a thirty-year old project of Scott's to retell a story found in Barbour's Brus. Set in the early fourteenth century during the Scottish Wars of Independence, an English knight for a love wager commits himself to defend Douglas Castle against Scottish attempts to retake it. The ballad-like story embraces intriguing elements including national rivalry, and the idealisation and betrayal of love. The Douglas area, seen as an almost surrealist landscape of ravines, trenches, and tombs, and in abysmal weather, forms an appropriate setting for an impressively bleak narrative

The noble seat, called Woodstock, is one of the ancient honors belonging to the crown. Several mannors owe suite and service to the place; but the custom of the countrey giving it but the title of a mannor, we shall erre with them to be the better understood. The mannor-house hath been a large fabric, and accounted amongst his majestie's standing houses, because there was alwaies kept a standing furniture. This great house was built by King Henry the First, but ampleyfied with the gate-house and outsides of the outer-court, by King Henry the Seventh, the stables by King James..

Set at the end of the reign of James VI and I, The Fortunes of Nigel sits among Walter Scott's richest creations in political insight, range of characterisation and linguistic virtuosity. Well versed in the political literature of the period, Scott drew a detailed picture of London in the early 17th century while charting the effects of Scottish influx into the English capital: the ambitions and fears of the incomers and the suspicion they aroused. The complex web of political (and sexual) intrigue, and especially of all-important financial dealings and double-dealings, is traced with a master's hand. No Scott novel has a more memorable cast of characters. King James heads them, with his childish irresponsibility and elusive character: a would-be Solomon and father of his country, theological disputant, prurient bisexual. But not far behind are jeweller George Heriot, clockmaker Davie Ramsay, courtier Sir Mungo Malagrowther, servant Richie Moniplies and many vivid minor characters. Steeped in Jacobean drama, this tale shows Scott revelling in the linguistic riches of the age.Previous editions have obscured his virtuosity (as seen in a dazzlingly proto-Joycean monologue by a Greenwich barber), but painstaking examination of the manuscript and proofs for this new edition allows the full vigour of Scott's achievement to be savoured for the first time

'Here is a plot without a drop of blood; and all the elements of a romance, without its conclusion', comments the King towards the end of Scott's longest, and arguably most intriguing, novel. Set against the backdrop of the Popish Plot to overturn Charles II, Peveril of the Peak explores the on-going tensions between Cavalier and Puritan loyalties during the fraught years of Restoration England. Ranging from Derbyshire to the Isle of Man and culminating in London it is a novel which interweaves political intrigue, personal responsibilities and the ways in which the forces of history are played out in the struggles of individual human lives. But its true subject is perhaps the role of narration and the limits of storytelling itself. In this, the first scholarly edition of Peveril, Alison Lumsden recovers a lost novel

The close observers of vegetable nature have remarked, that when a new graft is taken from an aged tree, it possesses indeed in exterior form the appearance of a youthful shoot, but has in fact attained to the same state of maturity, or even decay, which has been reached by the parent stem. Hence, it is said, arises the general decline and death that about the same season is often observed to spread itself through individual trees of some particular species, all of which, deriving their vital powers from the parent stock, are therefore incapable of protracting their existence longer than it does

Serie Writers and Critics

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