Biographie de Walter Scott
Walter Scott (1771-I 832) was born in Edinburgh of a Border family. After attending the High School and University of Edinburgh, he followed his father into the profession of the law, becoming an advocate (barrister) in 1792. In 1799 he was appointed Sheriff-Depute for the county of Selkirk, and in 1806 a Principal Clerk of the Court of Session-appointments that he retained until the end of his life.
His first major publication was a collection of ballads entitled The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). He became famous as a poet with The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810). In 1814 he published his first novel, Waverley, set during the Jacobite rising of 1745. Its success encouraged him to produce more historical novels, set in different countries and periods.
Those set in Scotland, like Waverley, have usually been regarded as his best. Scott's work was widely acclaimed in Europe and America. He spent the income from his writings on establishing a house and estate at Abbotsford, near Melrose. He was awarded a baronetcy by the Prince Regent in 1818. Partnership in the printing firm of James Ballantyne and Co. involved him in a financial crash in 1826. His last years were darkened by illness and the need to continue his output of writing to pay off the debts incurred.
His journal of those years is the most moving of his works. He died at Abbotsford in 1832 ; his biography was written by his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart. Claire Lamont is Emeritus Professor of English Romantic Literature at Newcastle University. She was a General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (completed in 2012) and has published widely on the literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly Jane Austen, Wordsworth, and Walter Scott.
She has also edited Scott's The Heart of Midlothian for Oxford World's Classics, and provided notes for Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism in the University of Oxford. Her recent publications include Jane Austen's Textual Lives : From Aeschylus to Bollymood (2005) and, with Marilyn Deegan, Transferred Illusions : Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (2009).
She is the editor of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts : A Digital Edition (2010), . In the (Oxford) World's Classics series she has also published editions of Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, and of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections.
