Fiction · 1894
The Prisoner of Zenda
The Prisoner of Zenda follows Rudolf Rassendyll, an idle English gentleman who happens to share both a name and an exact face with the King of the small country of Ruritania, whom he meets by chance on the eve of the coronation. When the real king is drugged and imprisoned by his ambitious half-brother Michael, Rassendyll is persuaded to take the throne in his place — and finds himself falling for the king's intended, Princess Flavia, while the swaggering, entirely amoral Rupert of Hentzau works to make sure the impersonation ends in murder.
Anthony Hope published the novel in 1894; its invented Central European kingdom gave the language a whole genre, the "Ruritanian romance," and its swordfights and doubles and doomed royal love made it one of the most imitated adventure novels of its decade. Hope wrote a sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, in 1898.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1894 text exactly as Anthony Hope wrote it.
Contents
- Chapter 1 — The Rassendylls—With a Word on the Elphbergs
- Chapter 2 — Concerning the Colour of Men’s Hair
- Chapter 3 — A Merry Evening with a Distant Relative
- Chapter 4 — The King Keeps His Appointment
- Chapter 5 — The Adventures of an Understudy
- Chapter 6 — The Secret of a Cellar
- Chapter 7 — His Majesty Sleeps in Strelsau
- Chapter 8 — A Fair Cousin and a Dark Brother
- Chapter 9 — A New Use for a Tea-table
- Chapter 10 — A Great Chance for a Villain
- Chapter 11 — Hunting a Very Big Boar
- Chapter 12 — I Receive a Visitor and Bait a Hook
- Chapter 13 — An Improvement on Jacob’s Ladder
- Chapter 14 — A Night Outside the Castle
- Chapter 15 — I Talk with a Tempter
- Chapter 16 — A Desperate Plan
- Chapter 17 — Young Rupert’s Midnight Diversions
- Chapter 18 — The Forcing of the Trap
- Chapter 19 — Face to Face in the Forest
- Chapter 20 — The Prisoner and the King
- Chapter 21 — If love were all!
- Chapter 22 — Present, Past—and Future?
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About this edition
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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