Physical description

Hard cover book. Prince Otto
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Publisher: Chatto and Windus
Date: 1895
Further Information: Green cloth, gilt-blocked spine with lettering and patterning to spine in black. The spine has a Library label with an inscription.

Publication type

fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with typed text PAT 823 STE
Paste down front end paper has a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Flyleaf has a stamp from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute

Summary

Prince Otto is a romance set in the fictional Ruritania-style German statelet of Grünewald. Prince Otto slips away from his escort near the border while out hunting and wanders into the neighbouring country of Gerolstein. Otto is regarded by his own people as an incompetent fool, incapable of ruling. He hears rumours that his wife, Princess Amalia Seraphina, is having an affair with the ambitious minister Baron Gondremark, with whom she effectively runs the country, and the plot spirals through a plotted coup, an order to arrest Otto, and a growing political crisis. Unlike Stevenson's boys'-adventure books, this one is a romance in which the marriage of the hero and heroine is not the happy ending but the central problem that the plot must resolve. The theme explores the moral compromises required by marriage. Stevenson considered this work unusually difficult to write, working on it over a five-month period; he called it 'my hardest effort'. One chapter was rewritten eight times by Stevenson, and once by his wife.