Count Robert of Paris

Count Robert of Paris goes further back in time than any other of Scott's novels, to witness the uneasy alliance between the Byzantine empire and the ambitious western leaders of the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century. The characters in this narrative range from an orang-utan to the historian Anna Comnena, who in the climactic scene encounters in single combat Brenhilda of Aspramonte, the warrior wife of Count Robert, pregnant with his child.
Condemned by Scott's printer as 'altogether a failure', Count Robert of Paris was prepared for publication by his son-in-law J. G. Lockhart and his publisher Robert Cadell. The process involved substantial cutting and re-writing, much of it quite unnecessary. What appeared was a bowdlerised, tamed and tidied version of what Scott had written and dictated. Scott's last full-length novel challenged the susceptibilities of his readers more directly than any other, and in that lay its fault in the eyes of the lesser men who condemned it. This edition is the first to have returned to the surviving portion of the manuscript and the extensive proofs.

J. H. Alexander is Reader Emeritus in English at the University of Aberdeen