Joy Fowler's Blog - Posts Tagged "sir-walter-scott"

When I was in fifth and sixth grades, I walked from my school to the school where my grandmother taught at the end of the school day. It was only a couple blocks and went straight by the public library which at that time was in an old house. There in one of the back rooms, with a grate for warm air from the oil furnace, in a corner of sunshine on the linoleum tile floor, I travelled to Scotland as a guest of Sir Walter Scott, the father of historical fiction. I read the famous titles of his Waverley novels first: Ivanhoe and Kenilworth, then went deeper to Quentin Durward and Redgauntlet until I had read the whole series. I circled back to read his historical romantic poetry like The Lady of the Lake and The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The books were old even in the 1960's, dusty and musty, with crackly yellowed pages but adorned with full color plates that sealed my fate as a lover of historical fiction time travel. When the library moved, sometime in the 80's, those Waverley novels were bequeathed to me- if I wanted them- as I had been the last person to check them out and the only person to ever check them all out. They are on my book shelf today, reminding me of the power of spellbinding writing on young minds.