Anthony Hope published The Prisoner of Zenda in 1894. Rudolf Rassendyll, an English gentleman, travels to Ruritania for the coronation of King Rudolf V and discovers that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the king, both are descendants of a Ruritanian princess who had an affair with a Rassendyll ancestor a century earlier. When the king is drugged and kidnapped by his half-brother Black Michael on the night before the coronation, Rassendyll is persuaded to impersonate the king for the day. The impersonation extends for weeks, and during it Rassendyll falls in love with Princess Flavia, who is the king's fiancée.
Hope's novel belongs to the tradition of romantic adventure fiction set in imaginary European kingdoms. What distinguishes The Prisoner of Zenda from many of its successors is the precision with which Hope manages the moral geometry of Rassendyll's position. He impersonates a man whose crown and fiancée he comes to want; he maintains the deception out of duty, rescues the king who is his rival, and surrenders both the throne and Princess Flavia when the rescue is complete. The code of honor that governs this sequence is presented seriously rather than ironically. Hope means the ending to function as genuine renunciation rather than merely frustrated desire.
The Prisoner of Zenda remains one of the most efficient examples of adventure romance in English, compact, well-paced, and emotionally coherent in a way that novels twice its length in the genre frequently are not. The imaginary Ruritania has given a word to the English language (Ruritanian, meaning romantic, imaginary, European-monarchical), which is one measure of the novel's cultural penetration. Its mechanism, the double, the impersonation, the love that cannot be pursued within the constraints honor imposes, has been replicated so many times that the original can seem conventional, but the original achieved the convention because it executed it with unusual clarity.
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