Andrew Lang, for instance, in an attack on “New Woman” writers Sarah Grand and “Iota” suggested that readers would do better to turn to Hope and others who represented “the good old tendency to love a plain tale of adventure, of honest loves and fair fighting” (“Tendencies” 160). Rider Haggard, Stanley Weyman, and others offered visions of heroic masculinity and yielding femininity that were very different from those depicted in contemporary “New Woman” fiction, in the naturalist novel, or in the “problem plays” that followed in the wake of Ibsen’s success. The work of such writers as Stevenson, H. This shift was a question of changing literary tastes, but it was also a question of gender politics. Hope’s tale appeared as part of a more general sea-change in late-Victorian fiction that saw the adventure romance vie with the domestic novel for popularity. Its swashbuckling aspect originated with such romans de cape et d’épée as Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers (1844) and the model for its colorful German principality probably include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Prince Otto (1885), set in tiny Grünewald, and perhaps even Jacques Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (1867), the first of many operettas with Ruritanian settings. For instance, Bret Harte’s parody, “Rupert the Resembler, by A-Th –Y H-pe,” appeared in his popular Condensed Novels: New Burlesques (1902), and Parker Brothers produced a board game, The Prisoner of Zenda (1896), in which players competed for military advantage on a stylized map of Ruritania.įrontispiece to Anthony Hope’s fast-paced bestellerAs reviewers suggested, Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda is a patchwork of earlier material. Indices of the popular success of the novel include parodies and even a game. The Pall Mall Gazette likewise noted that the hero is a “modern young man … yet the adventures which befall him would put those of ‘Arthur’s Knights’ into the shade” (“Reviews: Two Novels”). The Times admired the way Hope “interpolates a medieval romance in the civilization of the nineteenth century,” creating in the process a “singular mixture of epochs “: “no tale of adventure in far-off, mysterious countries surpasses the strange excitements this story of the three months spent by an English gentleman in the petty kingdom of Ruritania, in Germany” (“Recent Novels”). Although the novel is set in the recent past, swordplay is more common than gunplay, adding to the curiously timeless, or more accurately heterochronic atmosphere, in which different time periods seem to coexist. The most impressive of these villains is the devil-may-care Rupert of Hentzau, who returns as a thorn in the Ruritanian side in Rupert of Hentzau (1898). Much of the entertainment takes the form of clashes between the ever-resourceful Rassendyll and the henchmen of the King’s half-brother and arch-enemy, Black Michael. Ultimately Rassendyll and the princess must part, and he returns to private life in England. He saves the day first by impersonating the abducted King (a very distant relation) for the coronation ceremony, and then by rescuing him from the Castle of Zenda.
An idle English gentleman, Rudolf Rassendyll, visits Ruritania, a small, German-speaking, mittel-European state, where he becomes caught up in political scheming and falls in love with the lovely princess Flavia.
Ruritania made its debut in Hope’s fast-paced bestseller of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda, which creates a blueprint for dozens of similar narratives. The location of this semi-feudal territory is always a little vague, shifting from Germany in the 1890s, to the Balkans in the early-twentieth century, to the French Alps in the 1950s. The imaginary setting of Ruritania takes shape in the late–nineteenth-century imagination as a realm of romance and swashbuckling, a space for old-fashioned adventure in a modernizing world. Since the 1890s, Ruritanian backdrops have been reworked for a variety of purposes, from Balkan spy novels, to interwar operetta, to Cold War satires, in such fictional territories as Ixania, Krasnia, and Grand Fenwick. English and later American protagonists stumble into plot-driven narratives that usually feature some combination of schemes against the throne, doubles or mistaken identities, swordplay, and love at first sight. Anthony Hope’s bestseller of 1894, The Prisoner of Zenda, inspired a subgenre of adventure romances set in imaginary, semi-feudal European countries, of which Ruritania is the original.
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