The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Critical Biographies)

From Library Journal

Edgar Johnson's two-volume Sir Walter Scott (LJ 6/15/70), still the standard biography though it is out of print, indulges in special pleading for its subject and his books. Sutherland, who has published widely on Victorian literature, is more critical, showing small appreciation for the man or his writing. Sutherland is best in relating the works to Scott's life and times, for example, when he links the Napoleonic Wars to the battles that culminate each of Scott's major poems, or when Sutherland argues that the darkness of The Bride of Lammermoor mirrors Scott's sense of mortality at the time of composition. A good alternative to Sutherland is A.N. Wilson's thematically arranged The Laird of Abbotsford (Oxford Univ. Pr., 1980).Joseph Rosenblum, Greensboro, N.C.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Immediate and immensely readable, The Life of Walter Scott is a masterful account that penetrates into the darker areas of Scott's life in a skeptical (yet sympathetic) spirit, bringing the massive oeuvre and the chronicle of the life into manageable proportions, one illuminating 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. Through this account, Scott is justified as a writer to be read and understood today as much as in his heyday in the nineteenth century. -- Midwest Book Review