Waverley
An English gentleman with a taste for romance goes north, meets a Jacobite laird and finds himself inside the 1745 rising. Scott published it anonymously and it became the first bestseller of its kind, inventing the historical novel as a commercial form.
The hero is deliberately ordinary; the interesting characters are the ones around him, particularly the women and the Highland leaders. Scott's sympathy is divided between progress and loss, and that division is what makes the book more than costume drama. The pacing is slow for modern readers, but the set pieces repay patience.
Public-domain status
First published in 1814. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Walter Scott died in 1832, so this work has been free to republish there since 1903.
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