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    Kenilworth (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
    Unavailable
    Kenilworth (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
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    Kenilworth (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
    Ebook658 pages10 hours

    Kenilworth (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

    By Walter Scott

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Based on the alleged murder of Amy Robsart, first wife of the Earl of Leicester, Kenilworth turns on the events surrounding a secret marriage at Queen Elizabeth’s court, with tragic outcomes. Steeped in Elizabethan legend and filled with indelible imagery and deeply drawn characters, Kenilworth rivals the best dramas of the era.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarnes & Noble
    Release dateNov 1, 2011
    ISBN9781411441507
    Unavailable
    Kenilworth (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
    Author

    Walter Scott

    Sir Walter Scott was born in Scotland in 1771 and achieved international fame with his work. In 1813 he was offered the position of Poet Laureate, but turned it down. Scott mainly wrote poetry before trying his hand at novels. His first novel, Waverley, was published anonymously, as were many novels that he wrote later, despite the fact that his identity became widely known.

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    Reviews for Kenilworth (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

    3/5

    113 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is somewhat different from the other of Scott's books I have read. This has a Tudor setting, being based on the period when Elizabeth was enamoured of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. On progress, she visits Kenilworth, his castle, were he has built a wing for her accommodation and laid out gardens for her pleasure. It's still there, albeit ruined, but you can visit and walk in the footsteps of history. Having visited it was interesting to hear the place described in this book. It takes quite some time to get going, but gradually the tale of Amy, Dudley's wife, emerges. There is a clash between her and Dudley's ambition to be King. It all comes about in a short period of time, but the ending is very abrupt. There is certainly only a paragraph or two to deal with the aftermath, which sat oddly compared to the very slow and detailed buildup to the main core of the story. I assume it is a style of the time in that an awful lot seems to take place in speech, and quite convoluted speeches, at that. It needs a certain level of attention, otherwise it was quite easy to miss a critical plot point that was hidden in the midst of a lot of talk. Good, and an interesting read, but not great.
    • 3/5
      This historical novel is based extremely loosely around the events of the Elizabethan Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester's marriage to Amy Robsart, the controversial and tragic ending of which formed the subject of the historical investigation book Death and the Virgin by Chris Skidmore that I read recently. This novel does massive violence to the historical facts and one wonders why Scott bothered, given that the real historical facts are already exciting and scandalous enough to have formed a good novel, whether one takes the view that Amy's death in 1560 was murder, suicide or a tragic accident. This novel takes place in 1575 and as well as Amy being alive fifteen years after her death, Shakespeare is at the height of his literary powers here at the age of 11. All this aside, taken as a romantic historical novel, it is as well written as Scott's other works, though it lacks the punch of Ivanhoe. I was quite relieved to have reached the end after nearly two weeks of reading, though it is only 285 pages in this edition.
    • 3/5
      [Since I'm busy helping to put Scott's library into LibraryThing, I thought I'd better re-read at least one of his books...]Kenilworth is set in 1575, in and around the court of Queen Elizabeth. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and one of the most powerful men in England, has rather unwisely made a secret marriage to Amy Robsart, daughter of a lowly Devon knight. Since the Queen is famously jealous, and definitely doesn't like her favourites to fall in love with anyone except her, he's not too keen on telling her about Amy, and has stashed his wife away at Cumnor Place, near Oxford. Meanwhile, Amy is beginning to get fed up with not being able to tell anyone that she is Countess of Leicester, and Amy´s fiancé, Edmund Tressilian, is out looking for her. Events build to a climax when the Queen invites herself to Dudley´s castle at Kenilworth for an Elizabethan Fête.As usual with Scott, everything happens at a breathtaking pace, and, once you've come to terms with the deliberately quaint language, you find yourself turning the pages as eagerly as any nineteenth-century reader. The structure of the novel feels a little unsatisfying, largely because there is no single character the reader really gets a chance to identify with. We see the action from the point of view of a succession of minor characters, like a kind of relay race. Tressilian, a sort of Don Ottavio character, is frankly a bore, and the author clearly doesn't approve of either Amy or Dudley - Amy's weakness and opportunism got her into this mess; Dudley's vacillation prevents him from owning up to the Queen until it is too late. Since history prevents Scott from having Dudley end up on the scaffold, he can't really be portrayed as a protagonist of classical tragedy either, although this is clearly what Scott would have liked. However, the impressive characterisation of Dudley in the later chapters more than makes up for this structural flakiness.My late-Victorian edition (copiously annotated by my late-Victorian great-great-aunt) comes with extensive notes, presumably by Scott himself, listing his sources and giving every indication that the whole story is built on solid historical fact. A few minutes research on Wikipedia is enough to make it clear that Scott was being very economical with historical truth (or, to put it another way, made the story up as he went along and used his sources only for the authentic period detail): Dudley and Amy were in fact the same age, grew up on neighbouring estates, and married quite openly and with the full consent of their parents and the then King. Amy died in 1560, when they had been married for more than ten years (and two years before Dudley was made Earl of Leicester). Scott seems to have conflated the story of her controversial death with Dudley's (never proven) secret marriage to the widowed Lady Sheffield in 1573, which did upset the Queen and damage Dudley's career.
    • 2/5
      Some of Scott's historical fictions succeed, but Kenilworth isn't one of them. The problem is that the history is far too fictionalized. Leicester's marriage to Amy Robsart wasn't the enormous secret that Scott made it out to be; Scott's dates are all wrong (references to Shakespeare, for example, to Troilus and Cressida in particular as just one example); and he applies this highly fictionalized history to such a well-known historical figure as the Earl of Leicester. Scott fictionalizes his history in other Waverly novels, of course, one example being Anne of Geierstein, in which he gives Oxford a non-existent son, Arthur; but this is less jarring considering that, at least to myself and probably to most contemporary readers, late fifteenth-century English history is much less well known than Elizabethan history and John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, is a character we know only through Scott's own historical fiction.As an historical novel, Kenilworth, however entertaining, is just too factually off the mark for my taste.
    • 3/5
      1006 Kenilworth, by Sir Walter Scott (read 2 May 1969) This book has a slow beginning, then hits its lively pace...but a precipitous and disappointing ending. It deals withe the Earl of Leicester's marriage to Amy Robsart, but rearranges events of history to suit the story. The story is laid in 1574 and 1575, but Amy actually died in 1560! Will Shakespeare is freely quoted, and appears in the story--but he wasn't even born when Amy died! I was impressed while reading this book, but now feel somewhat cheated by it.
    • 3/5
      Scott is not more popular today because his style is so high flown that it completely leaves modern readers cold. I fell in love with the cadence while reading Ivanhoe when I was thirteen. So, if you can get beyond the flowery language there is a good story underneath. This is the tragic tale of Amy Robsart. Seduced, married and put away by the Earl of Leicester, she’s a difficult character to empathize with after a while. Her husband aspired to marry Queen Elizabeth causing him to conceal their marriage. Many women mistakenly marry treacherous men, but Amy is presented with multiple rescuers and opportunities to be saved from her situation but she is an indecisive fool, an absolute and utter nitwit who rejects every opportunity. Her great beauty landed her in this situation and inspired many to help her but she is as shallow and vacuous as can be imagined. In the face of strong, modern heroines her weakness and helpless state was a situation of powerlessness women found themselves in until recent history and could be off putting to many readers. The strong depiction of the historical personages and the unforgettable minor characters are worth the read. We will leave Amy to her fate.