The life of Walter Scott

the long version

Immediate and immensely readable, this masterful account is at the same time a work of major biographical scholarship. John Sutherland penetrates into the darker areas of Scott's life in a sceptical (yet sympathetic) spirit, bringing the massive oeuvre and the chronicle of the life into manageable proportions, one illumining the other. Scott - the 'Great Unknown' - has always presented challenges to the biographer. Layers of myth continue to protect him from posterity. There is also the sheer size of Scott's achievements as poet, novelist, man of letters, and self-made Laird of Abbotsford. Sutherland justifies Scott as a writer to be read and understand today as much as in his heyday in the nineteenth century.