Stanley J. Weyman

Stanley John Weyman was born in Ludlow, Shropshire, in 1855, the son of a solicitor. He attended Shrewsbury School and studied Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1877. After a short period teaching, he entered the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in 1881. Legal practice brought him neither much work nor much satisfaction, but it left time for the historical reading that would shape his fiction.

Weyman found his public in the early 1890s with swift historical romances set amid the religious and political conflicts of France. A Gentleman of France, Under the Red Robe and From the Memoirs of a Minister of France combined adventure with a close interest in rank, loyalty, disguise and the practical machinery of power. His narrators often believe they understand the evidence before them; the plot then tests how well they have read people, words and circumstances.

His books were widely read in Britain and abroad during his lifetime, though many later slipped from common view as literary fashion changed. Weyman continued writing into the twentieth century and died in 1928. At his best, he joined a historian's appetite for period detail to the clean movement of popular adventure.