Talk:Sophy of Kravonia

Reviews
in The Bookman December 1906:
 * For years Anthony Hope has seemed to be in the position of a man trying to live down the indiscretions of his mad, glad youth. It was The Prisoner of Zenda that gave him his audience and established a genuine "school" of fiction; and no one—not even the author himself—has been able quite to forget that story. Of late years he has tried diligently to give us something better. He has made honest, conscientious studies of the characters and problems of modern society without a touch of the fantastic impossibility of that early romance. Their dignified merit has been recognised, the serious purpose of the author applauded, and every comment has ended with the reflection, "Of course, it is not at all like The Prisoner of Zenda." The persistent reference of everything he has written to that trifling product of his salad days seems at last to have got on the author's nerves. "Hang it all!" he may be imagined saying, "they're still talking about that silly, superficial thing, are they? Very well; if they want Zenda stories, they shall have them." And forthwith he writes the best story he has given us since The Prisoner of Zenda.


 * Not, of course, quite so delightful as his early tale; he can never recapture that first fine, careless rapture. For The Prisoner of Zenda was in its kind a little masterpiece. Not a great kind, perhaps; a tissue of pure romance, as unreal as a dream. But it was supremely well done. It had the glamour, the verve and dash, the inspiriting clash of arms, the pretty sentiment, that belongs to romance. The spirit of the game never flagged. If it was not for a moment real life, it at least made you wish it were. And its influence has not yet perished. If Anthony Hope owed much to Stevenson—the Stevenson of Prince Otto—in its writing, he is in turn the model for all the romances of the last dozen years, which have played themselves out amid the intrigues and fighting of that imaginary kingdom whose real name on the map is Cockaigne. The imitators are, it is true, for the most part a sorry lot; it is a thing distinctly not worth doing unless it is done superlatively well. But Stevenson, whose most characteristic work is all informed with the spirit of inexhaustible youth, has by virtue thereof his rightful place on our shelves; and surely The Prisoner of Zenda is worthy of a place beside Prince Otto.


 * So Anthony Hope has at last turned imitator of himself. That fact is the exact measure of the distance between Sophy of Kravonia and The Prisoner of Zenda. Well, if we can't have the fine original again, let us be thankful for an imitation so nearly perfect. In this sort of thing Anthony Hope at his second best is far, far ahead of his competitors at their best. The new story has not only the familiar outlines, but as well much of the swing and dash of the model. The fact that the alien in the land of Kravonia is a woman—an Englishwoman, of course—doesn't matter. Kravonia meets her half way with a prince instead of a princess. And then Sophy is of the race of princesses of romance—a beautiful, daring, full-blooded, life-loving woman—a true adventuress, without the sinister implication of the word. Yet she has her touch of originality. The red star, the little wafer-like birthmark on her cheek that glows red when her heart beats fast, is a charming disfigurement. From the time Sophy comes by chance to Kravonia—the history of her earlier life is, to tell the truth, scarcely worth while—events move swiftly enough. The plots which surround the succession to the throne are ingeniously developed, Sophy's part in them inevitable. There is good fighting and better love-making. Perhaps Mr. Hope has lost some of his old exultation in the mere physical struggle, the actual meeting of enemies. There is brevity and reticence rather than gloating over the hand-to-hand conflicts. It is, when the lovers meet that his own heart is enlisted. Here we have a lover who can declare his love, a girl who can receive it, equally without self-conscious posing and mawkish silliness. It is sentiment, but it is simple and sincere. The scene wherein the mountain people make Sophy their queen, and that at the end of it all, when the girl goes out alone to decide what she shall do with her broken life, have real pathos. There are no thoughts here that do lie too deep for tears, but there is the simple, direct art of touching the surface where the tears lie readiest.


 * Mr. Hope keeps most of the varied threads of the story well in hand. At one point, however, he must have nodded. He describes with abundant detail Lepage's escape from the palace and his roundabout journey, after swimming the river, to Zerkovitch, whose house he reached about midnight. Colonel Stafnitz, who knew his relations with Zerkovitch, must have known hours before of his escape. Why, then, was he not intercepted at Zerkovitch's house? Why was Zerkovitch allowed to leave the city in the morning and carry to the prince the news of the king's death? Here is a big knot in the skein that requires untangling. But conspirators notoriously have their moments of monumental stupidity, and perhaps an author should be allowed on occasion to put himself in the place of his characters. A more grievous wrong Mr. Hope has done us in bringing his story to its real climax too early—which may, however, be offset by the neat way in which, once he is through, he has cleared the field of all vestiges of the combat. Kravonia disappears from the map as Sophy leaves it, engulfed by the armies of the adjacent great powers, much as the desert island sinks beneath the flood just as the rescued castaway sails away, or as 's nicely poised rock was dislodged by the final mighty leap of Ayesha's lover. No longer is there a Kravonia to which we may be again conducted in a sequel; which is, when one comes to meditate on it, not an unmixed blessing.

The Nation 25 October 1906:
 * Mr. Hawkins cannot be called mute, yet as to the note that he sounded in "The Prisoner of Zenda" his harp mouldering long has hung. His Rupert was hardly more than a spurious claimant to the affectionate interest aroused by the former book. In "Sophy of Kravonia," however, there comes a lawful heir to enthusiasm. In no way connected with its honored forerunner, it pulls at the same heartstrings. By a reversal it is now an English woman whose fortunes knot themselves up with those of a mythical kingdom, yet there is nothing mythical about Sophy, though everything that is original. She is a genuine and most charming person, with "her masculine mind and her feminine soul"—described by an admirer as being "like a singularly able and energetic sunbeam." The whole eventful story is so well knit that each marvel seems not only possible but almost inevitable, from the childhood of Sophy Grouch, daughter of an Essex farmer, till the time when she sits in the dwellings of kings, and wears the sheepskin tunic of the shepherd subjects of her prince. The conspiracy which thickens the plot is capitally developed, and long before the matter is solved the reader has quite forgotten that at the outset there was a certain sense of oppressiveness in the very serious marshalling of documentary evidence, as it for the history of a nation or the biography of a nation's hero.