WRITING THE RISINGS

In his 2019 King Over the Water – a complete history of the Jacobites, Desmond Seward provided a brief appendix looking at fictional treatments of Jacobitism. He mentioned Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan, D.K. Broster and Naomi Mitchison. There is perhaps one major omission which we’ll return to later.

Seward’s history was unusual in that he adopted a Jacobite perspective; for example, referring to James VIII and Charles III. It’s a perspective that much Jacobite-themed fiction has shared.

Sir Walter Scott was revolutionary in the way he used history in fiction. He didn’t invent the historical novel, but he took it in entirely new directions. In 1814, after a number of successful verse epics, he published his first prose. It was a stunning success. The eponymous hero is a romantically-inclined but ill-educated young English gentleman, Edward Waverley. He finds himself in the Scottish highlands during the ‘45 and struggles to adapt to a people and culture he does not understand.