Peter Abelard

By Helen Waddell and Kate Mosse

A new edition of the historical novel Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell introduced by Kate Mosse, the bestselling author of The Burning Chambers and Labyrinth.

The story of Heloise and Abelard is one of the most famous love stories of all time. He was a famous philosopher in 12th Century Paris and she was a gifted scholar. He takes on the role of her tutor and the two fall passionately in love. Heloise’s Uncle arranges for them to be married in secret but his motives are far from kind. He arranges a brutal attack on Abelard which leaves him a broken man. Both Heloise and Peter take holy orders but although separated physically their love for each other lasts for the rest of their lives.

First published in 1933 and a huge bestseller in its time, Helen Waddell’s novel tells their story with an intoxicating mix of drama and sensitivity and her own extensive scholarly research allows her to portray 12th France with astonishing vigour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781529003086

Helen Waddell

Helen Waddell was born in Japan in 1889, the youngest of 10 children. The family moved to Ireland where she excelled at school and won a place at Queens’ University Belfast. But she gave up a promising academic career to care for her step mother. At 31 she went to Oxford University where she studied for a PHD and she then moved to Paris to continue her research into 12th and 13th Century French history. After a spell working for a publishing company in London, she published Peter Abelard which was one of the biggest selling books of the 1930s and Waddell was propelled into literary stardom. She died in London in 1965.

Reviews for Peter Abelard

[john257hopper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a well researched and erudite historical novel about the famous love story of the Medieval religious and intellectual figures Abelard and Heloise (despite the latter not getting her due billing in the title). While their story is fascinating and colourful, I found this novel somewhat disappointing in that I thought it sometimes got bogged down in its erudition at the expense of telling the story, and I found the narrative sometimes confusing as the order of events in their life story, with which I have some familiarity, was confused.