Midwinter - John Buchan

. .

Résumé :
Midwinter: Certain travellers in old England is a 1923 historical novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It is set during the Jacobite rising of 1745, when an army of Scottish highlanders seeking to place Charles Stuart onto the English throne advanced into England as far South as Derby. The Prince, otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, the grandson of the ousted King James II, required men and money from English Jacobite sympathisers, and the novel imagines why those were not forthcoming from landowners in the Western counties and Wales. It purports to sheds light on Samuel Johnson's previously unknown activities during that period. Buchan was living in Oxfordshire when he wrote the novel, and the countryside around his home provided part of the novel's setting. His house, Elsfield Manor, had associations with the real-life Dr Johnson. One literary stimulus had come from Vernon Watley, a neighbour at Cornbury Park, who in 1921 sent him a copy of his own privately-published book Cornbury and the Forest of Wychwood, in which he recounted stories of Lord Cornbury harbouring Jacobite fugitives after Prince Charles's retreat from Derby. Buchan dedicated his book to Watley. In The Interpreter's House (1975), David Daniell reported that the book was widely admired, by J. B. Priestley among others. Daniell called it highly successful, being the Huntingtower of Buchan's historical novels, and he praised the spinnings of the wheel of Chance ... and the cunning plots and counter-plots. (wikipedia.org)

Biographie:
John Buchan (1875 - 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort in the First World War. Buchan was in 1927 elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities, but he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably writing The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.

Sommaire:
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875, the son of the Reverend John Buchan, a Presbyterian clergyman, and his wife Helen Masterton, the daughter of a sheep farmer. He read classics at the universities of Glasgow and Oxord before embarking on a career spanning the London bar, the Fleet Street press, the northern and southern hemispheres of the British Empire, the Houses of Parliament, and the long wooden shelves of literature. Best known today for his adventure stories, and in particular The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock brought to the cinema in 1935, he was a stakhanovite of English letters, penning dozens of novels and historical works in all. He died in Montreal in 1940....