Peveril of the Peak

Scott originally wished to publish the first of these, Ivanhoe (1819), in the name of its fictitious narrator, Laurence Templeton, who had been conceived as an English imitator of the Scottish Author of Waverley, thus creating a third Unknown, but was talked out of it by a publisher who feared that Scott's much-prized multiplicity was becoming simple confusion. But Scott needed, and created, several new casts of narrating characters to take him where he wanted to go, first to the epic matter of England (Ivanhoe, The Monastery [1820], The Abbot [1820], Kenilworth [1821], The Fortunes of Nigel [1822], Woodstock [1826]) and Britain (The Pirate [1821], Peveril of the Peak [1823], St. Ronan's Well [1823], Redgauntlet [1824], The Fair Maid of perth [1828]) and France (Quentin Durward [1823]) and Switzerland (Anne of Geierstein [1829]), and ultimately to the more general epic of East and West in the Tales of -306- the Crusaders (The Betrothed and The Talisman [1825]), Count Robert of Paris (1831), and the never-published Siege of Malta ...»