The Prisoner of Zenda

The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure novel by the English writer Anthony Hope, first published in 1894. It follows Rudolf Rassendyll, an idle English gentleman visiting the fictional central European kingdom of Ruritania, who discovers that he bears an uncanny resemblance to his distant relative, the kingdom's soon-to-be-crowned King Rudolf, a resemblance traced to a shared ancestor generations earlier. When the king is drugged and imprisoned on the eve of his coronation by his ambitious half-brother, Duke Michael, who hopes to seize the throne, Rassendyll is persuaded by loyal courtiers to impersonate the king through the coronation and beyond, in the process falling genuinely in love with the king's intended bride, Princess Flavia, even as he cannot reveal his true identity to her. Rassendyll must ultimately lead a daring rescue of the real king, imprisoned in the moated castle of Zenda and guarded by Michael's henchmen, most memorably the charming, amoral swordsman Rupert of Hentzau, before relinquishing the throne and Flavia and returning to his own obscure English life. The novel's invented Ruritania became so influential a template for fictional central European kingdoms of intrigue, doubles and swashbuckling adventure that later writers coined the term Ruritanian romance for the genre it founded, and the book's success led Hope to write a sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, continuing the story of its villain.