Tales of Two People

He started life-or was started in it-in a series of surroundings of unimpeachable orthodoxy-Eton, Christ Church, the Grenadier Guards. He left each of these schools of mental culture and bodily discipline, not under a cloud-that metaphor would be ludicrously inept-but in an explosion.That, having been thus shot out of the first, he managed to enter the second-that, having been shot out of the second, he walked placidly into the third-that, having been shot out of the third, he suffered no apparent damage from his repeated propulsions-these are matters explicable only by a secret knowledge of British institutions. His father was strong, his mother came of stock even stronger; he himself-Ambrose Caverly as he then was-was very popular, and extraordinarily handsome in his unusual outlandish style. His father being still alive-and, though devoted to him, by now apprehensive of his doings-his means were for the next few years limited. Yet he contrived to employ himself. He took a soup-kitchen and ran it; he took a yacht and sank it; he took a public-house, ruined it, and got himself severely fined for watering the beer in the Temperance interest.

Autorentext
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope (1863 -1933), was an English novelist and playwright. He was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels but he is remembered best for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau (1898). These works, "minor classics" of English literature, are set in the contemporaneous fictional country of Ruritania and spawned the genre known as Ruritanian romance. Zenda has inspired many adaptations, most notably the 1937 Hollywood movie of the same name.Hope trained as a lawyer and barrister, being called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1887. He had time to write, as his working day was not overly full during these early years and he lived with his widowed father, then vicar of St Bride's Church, Fleet Street. Hope's short pieces appeared in periodicals but for his first book he was forced to resort to a self-publishing press. A Man of Mark (1890) is notable primarily for its similarities to Zenda: