JOHN OXENHAM

Wanderlust in her blood. A crown in her future.

At seventeen, Alix Roustaine can bear the walls of her London boarding school no longer. Her father, a famous explorer, appears only once a year on her birthday, and this time she refuses to be left behind. Within weeks she is in breeches on the headwaters of the Amazon, commanding canoe-men, shooting, paddling, and loving every minute of it.

Then disaster strikes. Captured by headhunting tribesmen, rescued by a mysterious and gallant cousin, and left alone in the wilderness after her father’s death, Alix marries her rescuer in a tiny mission church deep in the forest. What follows is one of the most breathless adventures in Victorian fiction: an island paradise in the South Seas destroyed by kidnappers and a hurricane, a thousand-mile voyage in a home-built boat, and arrest, imprisonment, and escape through the burning streets of Valparaiso during the Chilean Civil War of 1891.

But the greatest trial still lies ahead. Widowed, penniless, and with only her small son left to her, Alix carries a letter from her dead husband to the mountain kingdom of Vascovia, and learns a secret that could put her boy on the throne. To claim his birthright she must face King Rolf, a ruler with a tiger’s temper and designs of his own, along with his scheming minister, kidnappers, and a doubt about her own marriage that threatens everything she holds dear.

First published in 1899, A Princess of Vascovy combines the exotic adventure of Rider Haggard with the palace intrigue of The Prisoner of Zenda, carried along by one of the boldest and most spirited heroines of the age. John Oxenham (William Arthur Dunkerley, 1852–1941) wrote more than forty novels, and this is among his liveliest.

This Read-Me.Org Modernized-Classic presents the complete novel, newly transcribed and restored from the original edition, with modernized spelling and punctuation. It also includes a new Introduction by Colin Heston and review and discussion questions for reading groups and classrooms.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 296p.