The Prisoner of Zenda
- Written By Anthony Hope
The Prisoner of Zenda
- Anthony Hope
The crown fits. That’s the problem.
Rudolf Rassendyll is an idle English gentleman with nothing better to do than travel to Ruritania and watch a coronation that has nothing to do with him … or so he believes. As it turns out, he shares a name, a face, and the unmistakable red Elphberg hair with a distant cousin he’s never met: the very man about to be crowned King Rudolf V. The night before the coronation, King Rudolf is drugged unconscious on his own half-brother Michael’s orders, and locked away at Zenda while Michael reaches for the throne.
With the coronation hours away and no king able to attend, Colonel Sapt and Fritz von Tarlenheim ask Rassendyll to stand in. Rassendyll takes the crown, the title, and even the king’s betrothed, Princess Flavia, who begins to fall for a man she thought she’d known all her whole life. The deception holds through ceremony and court, but Michael will not easily give up his brother’s throne. With a henchman on his trail, Rassendyll must free the real king from Zenda’s walls without revealing his own identity.
The Prisoner of Zenda gave the world the swashbuckling romance of a fictional European kingdom now simply called “Ruritania.” Beneath its swordplay and disguise sits the sharper dilemma of what Rassendyll owes—both to a crown that was never his, and to a woman whose love depends on a lie she cannot see.
“You should always trust a man … just as far as you must.”
About the Author
- Anthony Hope
Anthony Hope, born Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863–1933), practiced as a barrister in London before turning to fiction, writing under a shortened version of his name to keep his legal career separate from his novels. The Prisoner of Zenda, published in 1894, was reportedly written in a matter of weeks and became an immediate sensation, transforming Hope from a working lawyer into one of the most popular novelists in England, almost overnight.
The book’s invented kingdom of Ruritania proved so vivid that it entered the language: “Ruritanian” is still used today to describe any small, fictional European monarchy caught up in court intrigue. Hope returned to the world once more in the sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898), following the same characters to a darker conclusion.
Hope wrote more than twenty-five novels over his career, in addition to short stories, plays and nonfiction works, but none matched Zenda‘s popularity. The book has been adapted for film repeatedly since the silent era, and Rassendyll’s impersonation of a king he never meant to become remains one of adventure fiction’s most durable premises.
