Rogue Herries (Herries Chronicles)

Product Information

Fold-out Herrries family pedigree to rear, full red leather binding with gilt titles and gilt decoration, colour slightly faded down the spine and boards.

Andrew Vincent's Herries roisters like a periwigged Oliver Reed, while hinting at the emotional void that only the love of an inaccessible Gypsy girl 30 years his junior can fill. I first heard about Hugh Walpole more than fifty years ago and have just got around to reading some of his work. To the modern reader "thoughtful and meticulous" might be perceived as slow and over-elaborate but I personally liked very much the careful unveiling of the 50 or so years covered by this first of four volumes.Of his other novels of the 1920s Wintersmoon (1928), his first attempt at a full-length love story, portrays a clash between traditionalism and modernism: his own sympathies, though not spelled out, were clearly with the traditionalists. At the end of 1924 Walpole met Harold Cheevers, who soon became his friend and companion and remained so for the rest of Walpole's life. I’m told Walpole tells a good tale, but the novels fell from the general public’s taste after his death.

He visited his family, stayed with Percy Anderson in London, telephoned Henry James in Rye, and retreated to a cottage he had bought in Cornwall. Behind hotel are the Lodore Falls made famous by Southey’s poem (“How do the waters come down at Lodore…. It is in the ceremonial county of Cumbria, and is sometimes referred to as Cumberland Borrowdale to distinguish it from another Borrowdale in the historic county of Westmorland.In the view of Hart-Davis, Walpole only once recaptured "the fresh, clear cut realism" of this book, and Walpole himself, looking back on his work in the 1930s, felt that of all his books to date, it was the truest. which means there will be families visiting the Lake District with their children, so it may be a bit more crowded then than the first few weeks of October. No longer are the events as eye popping as they were to me as a child, but I bathed in the descriptions and the characters and the language. A more ambitious walk would be to see if there’s a bus to nearby Braithwaite and climb Grisedale Pike, but this would need a clear day and would be probably overly tough if you don’t regularly climb large steep hills (as would Skiddaw of course).

The Herries clan is covered by Walpole, focusing on Francis Herries, who has mood swings which one would treat with drugs today, but was let loose on the Lake District in the late 1700's. The priest does reappear and introduces Herries to Bonny Prince Charles during the 1745 rising and then just disappears. The success of his talks led to increases in his lecturing fees, greatly enhanced sales of his books, and large sums from American publishers anxious to print his latest fiction. In his adopted home of Keswick a section of the town museum was dedicated to Walpole's memory in 1949, with manuscripts, correspondence, paintings and sculpture from Brackenburn, donated by his sister and brother.

Having driven his wife to an early grave, sold his mistress at a country fair and buried the witch in the garden, Herries conceives a mysterious passion for Mirabell, an enigmatic Gypsy who eventually dies in childbirth, leaving an orphan and the prospect of three sequels to follow. The boys of Epsom College were delighted with the thinly disguised version of their school, but the college authorities were not, and Walpole was persona non grata at Epsom for many years. It's full of mad characters that you can't help but love and feel for, and the whole show makes you wish it was longer.