Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of the Border, as the region joining southern Scotland and northern England is known. The Border tales of his childhood stayed with him as he abandoned an early legal career to pursue his real love, writing: in 1802-1803 he published a three-volume collection of Scottish Border ballads called Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Its success established his literary reputation, which was secured over the next decade by a series of highly popular narrative poems, the most successful of which was The Lady of the Lake (1810). The poems featured the colorful Scottish settings and romantic themes that would also distinguish his early novels, the first of which, Waverly, was published to immediate acclaim in 1814. Over the next 15 years, Scott wrote more than 20 historical novels, all of them, like Waverly, published anonymously. Starting with Ivanhoe (1820), set in medieval England and the most popular of all Scott’s books, Scott expanded his range to include a variety of locales and historical periods. Despite Ivanhoe’s continuing popularity, it is Scott’s earlier novels, which take their settings from Scottish history, that have had the greatest impact.
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