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Author

G. P. R. James

1799–1860

28 fiction

G. P. R. James (1799–1860) was an English historical novelist and biographer who became one of the most prolific successors to Walter Scott. He began publishing historical fiction in the late 1820s and produced a very large number of novels set across medieval and early modern Europe. His stories typically combine invented protagonists with real rulers, soldiers and political crises, using court intrigue, warfare, romance and adventure to move characters through major historical events. James was particularly drawn to France and England from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, and his fiction helped make the historical romance a major part of nineteenth-century popular literature.

His historical novels include Richelieu (1829), set in seventeenth-century France under Cardinal Richelieu; Darnley, or, The Field of the Cloth of Gold (1830), centred on the reign of Henry VIII; Philip Augustus, or, The Brothers in Arms (1831), set in medieval France; Mary of Burgundy, or, The Revolt of Ghent (1833); One in a Thousand, or, The Days of Henry Quatre (1835), during the French Wars of Religion; Attila (1837), set amid the collapse of the Western Roman world; The Huguenot (1838) and Henry of Guise (1839), again dealing with religious and dynastic conflict in France; and Agincourt (1844), set around Henry V’s campaigns in France. Other works such as The Man at Arms, The King’s Highway and Henry Masterton use similar combinations of historical background, political conspiracy and adventure. James therefore ranges particularly strongly across the Hundred Years’ War, Tudor England, the French Wars of Religion and seventeenth-century European politics.

Periods and events

Battle of Agincourt1415 CE Burgundian State1363–1477 CE Early Modern France1498–1789 CE First English Civil War1642–1646 CE French and Indian War1754–1763 CE French Wars of Religion1562–1598 CE Holy Roman Empire962–1500 CE Hundred Years’ War in France1337–1453 CE Hunnic Empire and Attilac. 370–469 CE Jacobean Era1603–1625 CE Jacobite Rising of 17151715–1716 CE Medieval France987–1498 CE Reign of Louis XIV1643–1715 CE Restoration1660–1685 CE St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre1572 CE Thirty Years’ War1618–1648 CE Wars of the Roses1455–1487 CE

Historical fiction

Standalone historical fiction by G. P. R. James (28 books)

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