Rogue Herries
by Hugh Walpole. Introduction by Colin Heston.
A wild man, a stolen valley, and the love that outlasted everything.
In 1730, Francis Herries — reckless, restless, and already half a scandal — abandons his comfortable Yorkshire life and drags his wife, his mistress, and his children into the wilds of Borrowdale, a Cumberland valley whose people want nothing to do with outsiders. They call him "Rogue," and they are not wrong. He is cruel when he shouldn't be, unfaithful when it costs him everything, and incapable of being tamed by property, propriety, or the good opinion of his neighbors.
He is also unforgettable — and so is the country that swallows him whole.
Across four decades of storms both domestic and historical, Rogue Herries follows Francis's turbulent household: his son David, whose steadier heart anchors the family through scandal and rebellion; the Jacobite rising of 1745, when terror reaches the gates of Carlisle; and above all Francis's decades-long, never-quite-requited obsession with Mirabell Starr, the gypsy girl he first meets as a child and cannot stop pursuing for the rest of his life.
Hugh Walpole knew this ground before he wrote a word of it — he lived within sight of these fells for years — and it shows. Critics and readers have agreed for nearly a century that the true hero of this novel may be the Lake District itself: its weather, its light, its way of shutting a valley off from the world and daring you to belong to it.
First published in 1930, Rogue Herries became Walpole's best-selling and most enduring novel, the foundation of his celebrated four-volume Herries Chronicle, and the book by which he is still best remembered today.
This Read-Me.Org Classic Reprint edition features:
A newly corrected and reformatted text of the original 1930 American edition
A new critical introduction by Colin Heston, covering Walpole's life, the novel's origins, and its place in literary history
The original Herries family tree and map of Borrowdale, reproduced from the first edition
Clean, modern formatting for today's readers
Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 389p.