An English officer of romantic temper is posted to Scotland in 1745, is captured by Highlanders, and finds himself at the Pretender's court with a commission he cannot honourably keep. Scott published it anonymously in 1814 and effectively invented the historical novel with it; every European novelist of the next century read it. The rising is shown twice over — as a cause worth dying for and as an anachronism — and Scott refuses to choose. Forty-five plates after Reynolds, Romney and their contemporaries, ranging from battle scenes to country houses and cattle ferries, give a visual record of the age in which Scott's romance unfolds.
