Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole 1884-1941, English novelist, b. New Zealand, educated at Cambridge. His first two novels were failures, but with Fortitude (1913) he achieved financial and literary success. He was an uneven writer who turned out colorful, descriptive prose at a rapid pace; his best-known works include the historical Herries novels— Rogue Herries (1930), Judith Paris (1931), The Fortress (1932), and Vanessa (1933). Portrait of a Man with Red Hair (1925) is probably his best horror story. There are autobiographical elements in Jeremy (1919), Jeremy and Hamlet (1923), Jeremy at Crale (1927), and The Cathedral (1922). He also wrote short stories, several plays, biographies of Joseph Conrad (1916) and Anthony Trollope (1928), and the screenplay for the film David Copperfield (1934). Walpole was knighted in 1937.

Bibliography: See his autobiography (3 vol., 1924, 1932, 1940); biographies by R. Hart-Davis (1952) and E. Steele (1972).

Walpole, Sir Hugh Seymour (1884–1941), novelist, was born in New Zealand and came to England aged five. His short experience of teaching is reflected in his third novel, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1911), which set a vogue for novels and plays about schoolmasters. Other works include the Herries Chronicle, a historical sequence set in Cumberland consisting of Rogue Herries (1930), Judith Paris (1931), The Fortress (1932), and Vanessa (1933). Although proud of his popularity, he worried that his work was ‘old-fashioned’ and expressed envy of the Modernism of his friend and correspondent V. Woolf.