Scaramouche (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Softcover

From John Cloy’s Introduction to Scaramouche

When Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution was published in 1921, he was already an established author, with a dozen books to his credit. This swashbuckling novel, set during the French Revolution, won him an even larger audience and made him a tidy sum of money. Hailed as the new Dumas” by his admirers, the author was welcomed by lovers of action literature, historical fiction, and period stories. The novel was initially turned down by several publishers before being accepted by London publisher Hutchinson, who happily watched it sell hundreds of thousands of copies (the American publisher was Houghton Mifflin).Scaramouche was instrumental in resurrecting a flagging literary genre, the historical novel. Although historical fiction had enjoyed a brief rebirth during the years of World War I (probably because of a widespread demand for escapist literature), its vogue had quickly faded as soon as the conflict ended.

Perhaps the popularity of that relatively new medium, the movie, contributed to Sabatini’s success with this somewhat unfashionable literary form.Scaramouche was made into several films, one starring box office idols Stewart Granger and Janet Leigh. The writer’s well-crafted prose, his meticulous historical research, fluency in at least six languages, cosmopolitan background, and singular ability to tell a story in an interesting manner probably, however, played a bigger role in his success. Markedly different from the productions of Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (who essentially abandoned straightforward narrative for a more internalized, mental approach to fictional presentation that basically ignored chronological constraints), Sabatini’s historical novels continued to sell during the period between the wars when the fortunes of other purveyors of historical fiction were generally at a low ebb.

Sabatini’s upbringing was certainly a contributing factor to his ability to write historical fiction. He was born in 1875 in Jesi, in central Italy, the son of opera singers. His father, Vincenzo Sabatini, was an Italian, while his mother, Anna Trafford, was of English stock. Rafael learned the rudiments of English as a child from his mother but did not master the language until he went to England as a teenager. He was exposed at a young age to Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, all of which he spoke and wrote with facility. His schooling consisted of a year at the Lycée of Oporto, Portugal, where his parents had settled as music teachers, and several more years in Switzerland at the École Cantonale in Zoug. The young Sabatini’s years on the European mainland, with its crumbling castles, historical battlefields, and multicultural, often colorful populace, instilled in him a deep interest in history and reading that he never outgrew. A habit of omnivorous reading that he developed early in life built the framework for the painstaking research practices that he so fruitfully brought to bear on his historical novels.