What do you think?
Rate this book
Fortitude: Being a True and Faithful Account of the Education of an Adventurer
Fortitude is a memoir written by Hugh Walpole that tells the story of his life as an adventurer. The book is a detailed account of Walpole's education, both in the traditional sense and through his experiences traveling the world. The author takes readers on a journey through his childhood, his time at Cambridge, and his travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Along the way, he encounters a variety of people and cultures, and learns valuable lessons about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. The book is a testament to the power of perseverance and determination, as Walpole overcomes many obstacles in his quest for knowledge and adventure. It is a must-read for anyone interested in travel, self-discovery, and the human experience.1913. Walpole wrote horror novels that tended more towards the psychological rather than supernatural, with a brooding underlying mysticism. He achieved financial and literary success with Fortitude. The novel is a romance; a fairytale about a young man who very naively believes in almost everything; one of the author's school stories based on his experiences as a teacher, and an epic account of another young writer in the making. Its opening line acts as a clarion It isn't life that matters, but the courage you bring to it! See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
484 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1913
11 people are currently reading
174 people want to read
About the author
Hugh Walpole
413 books85 followersSir Hugh Seymour Walpole was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 2, 2025
FANTASTIC Book - dense, profound and leisurely in its Edwardian manner!
I knew it was a must read when I found the saintly activist Dorothy Day loved it, after reading it on the dogged insistence of her close epochal-writer-buddy, Eugene O'Neil. The two superstars were down and out in post-WWI Manhattan, and certainly needed a boost!
They found it here.
Sir Hugh Walpole here addresses himself to the wretched salt of the earth, such as they - and I - happened to be at one time. Blessed are the Spat Upon, as Paul Simon sang in 1964. And this book happens to be WONDERFUL.
Isn't it great when a counter-cultural nonconformist editor and writer like Ms. Day (and now, yes, being considered for sainthood by the Vatican) is changed by ONE BOOK? Such was Day's epiphany.
For she then saw that life is no Spectator Sport.
No - Walpole had a way to convince his readers that they must daily, hourly, moment-by-enervating-moment, TAKE UP THEIR CROSSES and bear life's low blows head on.
It's no treat to Eat Crow every night for dinner! But by such pains is a man made.
Sir Hugh, of course, was emulating Zarathustra rather than Christ. No matter for Day and for us. It's the FORTITUDE that counts, as the ancient wag Old Frosted Moses says in the first chapter.
You have to be Tough Enough to bear Life's Yoke!
Walpole has his tender side, though. His hero's true friends remain true to the end. Yes, Walpole was gay, and he lived through the dark days of Oscar Wilde's imprisonment for his "crime," so he held his tongue about it.
But we moderns can appreciate this fine novel of a vanished age on its own outstanding merits.
It deals with a pastoral England in loving, almost purple outpourings over its bucolic beauty.
Its characterizations are so real they're to die for.
And its message?
"Life's tough, and its ultimate meaning only becomes clear by one path -
"Our FORTITUDE."
I knew it was a must read when I found the saintly activist Dorothy Day loved it, after reading it on the dogged insistence of her close epochal-writer-buddy, Eugene O'Neil. The two superstars were down and out in post-WWI Manhattan, and certainly needed a boost!
They found it here.
Sir Hugh Walpole here addresses himself to the wretched salt of the earth, such as they - and I - happened to be at one time. Blessed are the Spat Upon, as Paul Simon sang in 1964. And this book happens to be WONDERFUL.
Isn't it great when a counter-cultural nonconformist editor and writer like Ms. Day (and now, yes, being considered for sainthood by the Vatican) is changed by ONE BOOK? Such was Day's epiphany.
For she then saw that life is no Spectator Sport.
No - Walpole had a way to convince his readers that they must daily, hourly, moment-by-enervating-moment, TAKE UP THEIR CROSSES and bear life's low blows head on.
It's no treat to Eat Crow every night for dinner! But by such pains is a man made.
Sir Hugh, of course, was emulating Zarathustra rather than Christ. No matter for Day and for us. It's the FORTITUDE that counts, as the ancient wag Old Frosted Moses says in the first chapter.
You have to be Tough Enough to bear Life's Yoke!
Walpole has his tender side, though. His hero's true friends remain true to the end. Yes, Walpole was gay, and he lived through the dark days of Oscar Wilde's imprisonment for his "crime," so he held his tongue about it.
But we moderns can appreciate this fine novel of a vanished age on its own outstanding merits.
It deals with a pastoral England in loving, almost purple outpourings over its bucolic beauty.
Its characterizations are so real they're to die for.
And its message?
"Life's tough, and its ultimate meaning only becomes clear by one path -
"Our FORTITUDE."
May 31, 2011
What more tempting place can there be than a library's used bookstore? In this case, the venue was the Berkeley Public Library's store, and the find was a Hugh Walpole novel. I knew almost nothing about Walpole other than his name being notable, and nothing at all about this book, but what a great page-turner it was, even allowing for its excesses of romanticism and sometimes exaggerated characters.
The protagonist is Peter Westcott, whom we meet as a boy in his native Cornwall, living with a brutal father (every English novel has to have one brutal father, right?), his sickly mother, his demented grandfather and a kindly but none too knowledgeable servant. These are the people of his household, but the master of his heart is Stephen Brant, a giant of a farmer who loves Peter and also is hopelessly smitten with a woman who married a rival.
Peter goes to the obligatory bleak boarding school, where he meets two friends of very different temperaments who will play major roles in his life later, and afterward, rebelling against his father's insistence that he stay at home, he goes to London in the company of the mysterious Mr. Zanti, where he works in a used bookshop, lives in a boarding house jammed with Masterpiece Theater character actors, and works on his first novel, which eventually is published to great success.
The latter half of "Fortitude" plays out the rocky beginning of his marriage to the beautiful, vain Clare, who seems to have little interest in his writing and little ability to tolerate any stress in her comfortable only-child existence. They have a son together, but then everything seems to unravel, and by the end of the novel, Peter must come to terms with the way life really is, the fickle dealings of fame and fate, a realization that he has let go of people who truly loved him, and a determination nevertheless to persevere through it all.
Yes, it's a Victorian soap opera, but I was pulled through at every turn.
Want to read
July 17, 2013Otto Scott: Hugh Walpole, as you know, was a very popular novelist in Great Britain and I think his time past with the 30s. I am not sure. Fortitude was one of his first books and it was really his masterwork. It was semi autobiographical. Somerset Maugham stole a part of the plot and made himself famous with it when he wrote A View in Bondage and he hated Walpole ever afterwards because Walpole was a man from whom he stole.
Now I read Fortitude when I was about 19 and I was alone in the world and I was on my own. And at that time I had a habit of going out and having a few drinks and picking a fight with somebody and beating him up. And I took great pleasure in this because I ... it was very deceptive. I would pick on fellows that were bigger than I was, but they didn’t know how to fight. I kept them in the alley and it would be very quick work. And I felt a great satisfaction. And then I read Fortitude because I also spent a lot of time in those days in the library. And the protagonist of Fortitude was a boy who was sent away to school, as they do in England, and he was afraid of his father. His mother had died young, when he was young. And his father seemed austere and hard and impervious and invulnerable and so forth.
However, toward the end of his school years, he began to see some softening in his father and his father had a house keeper. In the interim the boy in school got involved in rugby and took great pleasure hurting the other fellow in the game. And finally when he reached about the time of graduation he realized that his father was not strong at all. His father was a secret drinker and had several other vices. And he realized that that harsh façade that was just exactly that. And he began to realize, too, that hurting the other boys in ruby was not a sign of strength, but a sign of weakness because he was allowing himself to give way to the temptation, you might say, to hurt. And for the first time reading this I caught the point that I would have to watch this business of picking a fight with some poor fellow who didn’t know how to handle himself, because it was really giving way to a sadistic impulse. And Sadism, as you know, is one of the great temptations for men, as I suppose Masochism might be for women.
And that afterwards the protagonist in the book—and it was a very complex and long book—went to London and got involved in London with a girl of a lower class. This is where Somerset Maugham stole the whole theme. And he married, the protagonist married and the girl ran away with his best friend. And at the end of the novel he was walking into the furniture in his room, but he was making up his mind that he was going to pick up the pieces of his life and continue.
The most powerful effect of that book—because I never again picked a fight—it caused me for the first time in my life to sit down and to examine myself in terms of strengths and weaknesses.
Now I read Fortitude when I was about 19 and I was alone in the world and I was on my own. And at that time I had a habit of going out and having a few drinks and picking a fight with somebody and beating him up. And I took great pleasure in this because I ... it was very deceptive. I would pick on fellows that were bigger than I was, but they didn’t know how to fight. I kept them in the alley and it would be very quick work. And I felt a great satisfaction. And then I read Fortitude because I also spent a lot of time in those days in the library. And the protagonist of Fortitude was a boy who was sent away to school, as they do in England, and he was afraid of his father. His mother had died young, when he was young. And his father seemed austere and hard and impervious and invulnerable and so forth.
However, toward the end of his school years, he began to see some softening in his father and his father had a house keeper. In the interim the boy in school got involved in rugby and took great pleasure hurting the other fellow in the game. And finally when he reached about the time of graduation he realized that his father was not strong at all. His father was a secret drinker and had several other vices. And he realized that that harsh façade that was just exactly that. And he began to realize, too, that hurting the other boys in ruby was not a sign of strength, but a sign of weakness because he was allowing himself to give way to the temptation, you might say, to hurt. And for the first time reading this I caught the point that I would have to watch this business of picking a fight with some poor fellow who didn’t know how to handle himself, because it was really giving way to a sadistic impulse. And Sadism, as you know, is one of the great temptations for men, as I suppose Masochism might be for women.
And that afterwards the protagonist in the book—and it was a very complex and long book—went to London and got involved in London with a girl of a lower class. This is where Somerset Maugham stole the whole theme. And he married, the protagonist married and the girl ran away with his best friend. And at the end of the novel he was walking into the furniture in his room, but he was making up his mind that he was going to pick up the pieces of his life and continue.
The most powerful effect of that book—because I never again picked a fight—it caused me for the first time in my life to sit down and to examine myself in terms of strengths and weaknesses.
April 14, 2013
I picked this book up in a charity shop, and it was the book that first took me into the wonderful world of Hugh Walpole's writing.
From the moment I read the first words 'Tis not life that matters, but the courage you bring to it' I knew that this author was going to be a true literary friend. It led me to buy every book Hugh Walpole ever wrote.
If you like a strong character led novel, then following the adventures of Peter Wescott in 'Fortitude' could be a classic read for you.
From the moment I read the first words 'Tis not life that matters, but the courage you bring to it' I knew that this author was going to be a true literary friend. It led me to buy every book Hugh Walpole ever wrote.
If you like a strong character led novel, then following the adventures of Peter Wescott in 'Fortitude' could be a classic read for you.
October 12, 2022
I am fascinated by this book now as much as I was at age 14, but with more understanding. It's essentially about escaping the downward pull of a dark childhood and emerging not into happiness, but into light.
For some readers, there are passages that might be too purple, but I think they work well with the intense and dramatic story. Here is the not-yet-30 protagonist after three cruel blows from life, each one enough to defeat the strongest person.
"Peter Westcott was dead. They put his body into the 11:50 from Paddington. ... The eyes of the body were the high blank windows of a deserted house. Behind them were rooms and passages, but lately so gaily crowded ... now suddenly empty -- swept of all recent company, waiting for new, for very different inhabitants."
He is going home to the dark house in Cornwall and his abusive father to wallow in defeat. It is near the end of the book but is not the end. Even though I know the story well, I had to keep reading ahead to fortify myself against all the intense passages to come. It's stressful but ultimately satisfying.
In a nutshell, we follow Peter, the imaginative child of a toxic home who absorbs what little strength he has from the kindness of a local farmer. We follow him as he faces beatings from his father, attends a vicious boarding school, runs away from home, and grows to biological adulthood while staying in many ways a boy. His longed-for career as a novelist seems to be on an upward trajectory, as a marriage for love and a new baby fill him with joy. Until it all ends.
He thought he had escaped his history. He has to learn you don't escape that easily.
For some readers, there are passages that might be too purple, but I think they work well with the intense and dramatic story. Here is the not-yet-30 protagonist after three cruel blows from life, each one enough to defeat the strongest person.
"Peter Westcott was dead. They put his body into the 11:50 from Paddington. ... The eyes of the body were the high blank windows of a deserted house. Behind them were rooms and passages, but lately so gaily crowded ... now suddenly empty -- swept of all recent company, waiting for new, for very different inhabitants."
He is going home to the dark house in Cornwall and his abusive father to wallow in defeat. It is near the end of the book but is not the end. Even though I know the story well, I had to keep reading ahead to fortify myself against all the intense passages to come. It's stressful but ultimately satisfying.
In a nutshell, we follow Peter, the imaginative child of a toxic home who absorbs what little strength he has from the kindness of a local farmer. We follow him as he faces beatings from his father, attends a vicious boarding school, runs away from home, and grows to biological adulthood while staying in many ways a boy. His longed-for career as a novelist seems to be on an upward trajectory, as a marriage for love and a new baby fill him with joy. Until it all ends.
He thought he had escaped his history. He has to learn you don't escape that easily.
Want to read
February 12, 2016Free download available at Project Gutenberg.
September 3, 2018
In my post-Twitter, time-to-read-the-classics self-improvement, self-exploration phase, this book was on the top of the pile.
Why?
Well, funny coincidence: I bought it a while ago because someone I had admired on Twitter and with whom I'd had a few casual exchanges, nothing of depth or meaning, had gone on and on about it and Walpole. So, used copy, 1930 hardback Modern Library edition, foxed edges, all that "just the sort of stuff I like" kind of book.
No sooner had I begun reading it than did its recommender hasten my exit from Twitter. A fact which colored my enjoyment of this novel.
There is much to admire, but did I love it? No. Was it as tough a slog as The Portrait of a Lady had been for me a week or so before? Not even close. Would I recommend you read it? Well, if you're one of my regular followers, most of whom I know personally, I'd say probably no.
Then, every so often, there's a passage like this:
"Her plump arms, her broad and placid bosom, her flat smooth face, her hair, entirely negative in colour and arrangement, offered no clue whatever to her unsuspected sharpnesses. Smooth, broad, flat and motionless, she carried, like the Wooden Horse of Troy, a thousand dangers in the depths of her placidity."
Now, putting aside the excess of commas (look who's talking) and the odd capitalization of Wooden Horse, and, too, giving up on figuring out just exactly what the hell is meant by "placid bosom" --- those last nine words: "...a thousand dangers in the depths of her placidity." constitute the kind of writing that make you understand why someone of literary bent would go on and on about it.
I won't. And I also won't be unkind to someone who clearly means nothing but to bring joy to his little portion of the world.
So there. And that. And make of it all what you will. Fortitude, my friends. Fortitude.
Why?
Well, funny coincidence: I bought it a while ago because someone I had admired on Twitter and with whom I'd had a few casual exchanges, nothing of depth or meaning, had gone on and on about it and Walpole. So, used copy, 1930 hardback Modern Library edition, foxed edges, all that "just the sort of stuff I like" kind of book.
No sooner had I begun reading it than did its recommender hasten my exit from Twitter. A fact which colored my enjoyment of this novel.
There is much to admire, but did I love it? No. Was it as tough a slog as The Portrait of a Lady had been for me a week or so before? Not even close. Would I recommend you read it? Well, if you're one of my regular followers, most of whom I know personally, I'd say probably no.
Then, every so often, there's a passage like this:
"Her plump arms, her broad and placid bosom, her flat smooth face, her hair, entirely negative in colour and arrangement, offered no clue whatever to her unsuspected sharpnesses. Smooth, broad, flat and motionless, she carried, like the Wooden Horse of Troy, a thousand dangers in the depths of her placidity."
Now, putting aside the excess of commas (look who's talking) and the odd capitalization of Wooden Horse, and, too, giving up on figuring out just exactly what the hell is meant by "placid bosom" --- those last nine words: "...a thousand dangers in the depths of her placidity." constitute the kind of writing that make you understand why someone of literary bent would go on and on about it.
I won't. And I also won't be unkind to someone who clearly means nothing but to bring joy to his little portion of the world.
So there. And that. And make of it all what you will. Fortitude, my friends. Fortitude.
June 27, 2018
This book introduces us to young Peter Westcott, who overcomes a difficult childhood in Cornwall and eventually makes good as an author in London. The first part of the book is about his difficult public school experience, which biographers of Mr. Walpole suggest was based on Mr. Walpole's personal experiences. If you can get beyond the perfervid prose, it's a nice book. There is a lot about the London literary scene in the 1890s. Also lots of descriptions of the down-at-heel lives of men and women who have no inherited income or other safety nets but who are trying to live respectable middle class British lives. This is the first of Mr. Walpole's London series which I am rereading after many years. With such an interesting backstory, it is gratifying that we will see a lot of Mr. Westcott in Mr. Walpole's subsequent books.
July 10, 2018
I found this rather over-written at times, and I have a an almost unbounded appetite for meaty prose. The last few pages especially needed a bit of editing. On the whole a great book, though, with some wonderful characters, two excellently written small boys one of whom gets completely forgotten....
I think we are supposed to despise Clare but I loved her, her fear of everything, what insight. I'd recommend this to anyone who likes a good, character-driven tale.
I think we are supposed to despise Clare but I loved her, her fear of everything, what insight. I'd recommend this to anyone who likes a good, character-driven tale.
April 15, 2020
Another amazing Hugh Walpole book that creates a reality more tangible and perhaps more deeply felt than one's own. Didn't want it to end. So artfully woven together.
Want to read
June 30, 2025Read this book online for free through Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7887...
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews