Historical Fiction Weyman, Stanley J.: The Red Cockade v2 27 April 2014

[AlexBell]

Stanley John Weyman was born at Ludlow in Shropshire in 1855, the second son of a solicitor. He went to Shrewsbury School, then to Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1877 with a degree in history. With this degree he was not able to make much of a living for himself and prospects were discouraging. He was called to the Bar in 1881 and practiced law for 'eight wretched years' never making more than £200 in any given year, and frequently angering judges with his nervous incompetence in court.

Novelist and Cornhill Magazine editor James Payn convinced him to undertake fiction. Weyman began publishing in 1883 with his short story The Story of a Courtship for The English Illustrated Magazine. But not until his first novel The House of the Wolf, set in 16th Century France, was he catapulted to fame in 1890. From 1890 onward, he was the lion of a very special and elegant literary form. His best books, including From the Memoirs of a Minister of France (1893), A Gentleman of France (1893), Under the Red Robe (1894) and The Red Cockade (1895) are all but without parallel in excellence.

The Red Cockade is a ... swashbuckling historical romance, set around 1789 in Cahors and Nimes at the time of the French Revolution, [describing the] adventures of an aristocrat sympathetic to the cause of the people. The San Francisco Chronicle said this one "deserves a place among the best historical fiction of the latter part of this [the nineteenth] century." One of Weyman's finest.

Adapted from www.violetbooks.com/weyman.html
and www.violetbooks.com/weyman-bib.html

The source text for The Red Cockade was Project Gutenberg 39297-h.htm, checked against the 1895 Longmans Green edition. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, replaced diacritics in French words, used British English, and made minor changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

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