Waverley

Edward Waverley is a young English officer whose romantic education has left him poorly prepared for political conflict. Sent to Scotland in 1745, he visits the Jacobite Baron Bradwardine and then enters the Highland world of Fergus and Flora Mac-Ivor. When his association with suspected rebels destroys his army career, Edward allows admiration, resentment and personal loyalty to carry him into Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign.

The Jacobite victory at Prestonpans initially seems to confirm the glamour of the cause, but retreat and defeat expose the distance between heroic imagination and political reality. Edward must survive the collapse of the rising, the execution of Fergus and his own prosecution for treason. His eventual reconciliation with the Hanoverian order and marriage to Rose Bradwardine make the novel a study of how post-Union Scotland absorbs a defeated but emotionally powerful past.