Kenilworth

Reading time: about 13.5 h
Length: 188,086 words · 338 pages
Structure: 41 chapters · 3 front-matter sections
Language: English
Era: Romantic

In the England of Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, keeps a devastating secret from the Queen: he is already married, to a young woman he has hidden away in the countryside as the danger to his ambitions and her safety both draw toward a single, doomed reckoning at Kenilworth Castle.

Walter Scott published Kenilworth in 1821, one of the most popular of his Waverley novels; building freely, by his own admission, on the historical Amy Robsart's real and unexplained death, it helped fix the Earl of Leicester's dark reputation in the popular imagination for generations, a portrait historians still debate today.

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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

Walter Scott

1771–1832 · Romantic

Walter Scott (1771–1832) was born in Edinburgh, practised as an advocate, and held the offices of Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire and Clerk of Session for most of his life. He was the most popular poet in Britain — The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion, The Lady of the Lake — before turning, anonymously, to the Waverley novels in 1814. Ivanhoe (1819) was the first he set outside Scotland. Made a baronet in 1820, he was ruined by his publishers’ failure in 1826 and wrote on to pay the debts.

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