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The Laird of Abbotsford: A View of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford Lives)

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Andrew Norman (A. N.) Wilson in THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD: A VIEW OF SIR WALTER SCOTT showcases a dozen or so aspects of his hero's life as that life spilled over into books. It was a life full of bad health, beginning with a right leg forever lamed by polio at age 18 months, losses of family and friends and culminating in six years of near financial ruin. Yet throughout Sir Walter Scott's basic philosophy was life-affirming. Over and over he would pick himself up after setbacks and throw himself into his great literary work. He wrote in his journal late in life when all looked particularly bleak, that amid 'all these vexatious circumstances of politics and health ... the blue heaven bends over all.'

Things were always going to get better, Walter Scott believed. From advice in Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE he took to heart and repeated in his own works and Journal the image of a player losing at cards who knows that sooner or later his luck will turn. Thus in QUENTIN DURWARD the hard pressed King Louis XI of France says, "But patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards, till our hand is a stronger one."

Scott loved in turn three women. The first affair was pre-University puppy love. The second woman rejected him. With the third he built a rational, calm, friendship-based marriage and family. A. N. Wilson traces the overflow of these loves into such novels as THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN, THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR and KENILWORTH.

Scott hated fanaticism and superstition in the religions of Scotland but did their adherents justice in OLD MORTALITY, THE MONASTERY AND THE ABBOT. He also produced the most convincing array of three-dimensional "characters" in literature after Shakespeare.

Wilson's THE LAIRD OF ABBOTSFORD deserves reading over and over. If you have never read a word of Walter Scott, this book will give you a jump start into knowing what "Scott-Land" is all about. And the more poems, histories, romances and novels of Sir Walter that you read, the more penetrating and personally salient will the insights of A. N. Wilson become to you.