Recommendations
Books Like Waverley
Best books to read after Waverley by Walter Scott
Readers who love Waverley — Scott's founding historical novel about Edward Waverley's entanglement in the 1745 Jacobite rising — will enjoy these works of historical fiction, Scottish literature, and the great tradition of the novel that uses the past to illuminate the present.
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Buy on AmazonThe Heart of Midlothian
by Walter Scott
Scott's most humanly sympathetic novel and the one most critics consider his finest — Jeanie Deans's walk to London to plead for her sister's life is the most sustained narrative achievement in Scott's fiction; read immediately after Waverley.
- 2
Buy on AmazonOld Mortality
by Walter Scott
Scott's darkest and most politically complex novel — the Covenanting rising of 1679 is treated with the same historical imagination as Waverley's 1745 Jacobite rising, but with greater moral seriousness about the costs of religious fanaticism.
- 3
Buy on AmazonWar and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy acknowledged Scott's direct influence on War and Peace — Tolstoy's Napoleon and the 1812 campaign are treated exactly as Scott treats Bonnie Prince Charlie and the 1745 rising: through the experiences of ordinary individuals caught up in historical forces too large to comprehend; the greatest historical novel.
- 4
Buy on AmazonA Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's historical novel of the French Revolution is the most direct Victorian heir to Waverley's method — the individual caught up in historical catastrophe, the romance plot against the revolutionary background, the contrast of cultures (English vs. French, as Waverley contrasts English vs. Highland).
- 5
Buy on AmazonRob Roy
by Walter Scott
The Scott historical novel closest to Waverley in method and tone — another English narrator entering the Scots/Highland world, this time the Glasgow merchant world and Rob Roy's outlaw Highland life; more comic and energetic than Waverley, and the natural next read.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper
Cooper cited Scott as his primary model and transposed the Waverley formula to colonial North America — Natty Bumppo moving between European colonial and Native American worlds is the American equivalent of Waverley moving between English and Highland worlds; the most direct international heir.
- 7
Buy on AmazonKidnapped
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson's adventure novel is set in the same Highland world as Waverley — David Balfour's journey with Alan Breck across the post-Culloden Highlands (the consequences of the 1745 rising that Waverley's hero barely escapes) is the Victorian heir to Scott's romantic Highland landscape.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Betrothed
by Alessandro Manzoni
Manzoni's novel (1827) is the Italian Waverley — inspired directly by Scott, it follows Renzo and Lucia through the historical catastrophe of the plague and the Spanish occupation of Milan in the 1620s; one of the founding texts of the Italian novel and a direct response to Scott.
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