Anthony Hope

Anthony Hope was the pen name of Anthony Hope Hawkins, a London-born novelist who first trained and practised as a barrister. The National Portrait Gallery records that he was called to the Bar in 1887 and continued in law until the success of The Prisoner of Zenda in 1894 made it possible to leave practice for writing. His first novel, A Man of Mark, had appeared four years earlier. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica traces a sequence of novels and story collections leading to Zenda’s sudden popularity.

The book introduced the fictional Central European kingdom of Ruritania and the Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll, whose resemblance to its king draws him into a political crisis. Hope returned to that setting in Rupert of Hentzau in 1898, but his bibliography ranged across other romances, social novels, plays and short fiction. He was knighted for wartime propaganda work, a public role distinct from his career as a novelist. The surviving portrait record includes caricatures and photographs from different stages of his life; the author plate uses a documented likeness rather than inventing one. Hope’s byline on The Prisoner of Zenda marks the moment when his legal and literary careers parted.