The Cut and a Kiss

Well, I finished reading Anthony Hope’s The Cut and a Kiss earlier this week. I quite enjoyed it. The premise of the novel is the sharing of various stories of mishaps in love, which are told by several gentlemen amongst themselves at a gentlemen’s club to pass the time. My favorite stories were A Stage on the Road and Love's Condundrum.

The first story concerns a young man’s struggle with his feelings for a woman who is slightly older than he is and is regrettably married. In the end, the lady flees with her family and husband to another city in England. Years later, she sees the same young man on a beach front, but he doesn’t realize his first love. The second story involves a philosopher who is more concerned with ‘proofing’ a colleague’s latest publication than a girl’s blotched attempt at proposing marriage in a roundabout way using ‘what if A’ and ‘what if B’ logic. The story had me laughing because the poor man was so intent on answering her question of logic on whether she would be more happy with A (average man) than B (a smart man aka the philosopher) that he didn’t realize that she was asking for ‘his hand’ in marriage. As my sister says you can have all the book smarts in the world, but you will still lack common sense. I can attest to that, sometimes I’m just plain silly about things.

As I was researching Anthony Hope and his various novels to see what else he had written, I noticed something quite interesting (at least to a book nerd like myself). Apparently, Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda started a new type of literary genre called Ruritanian romance. The main character of Zenda, Rudolf Rassendyll, decides to seek adventure and heads off to the fictional kingdom of Ruritania. There he is mistaken for the king of Ruritania who has been kidnapped and held for ransom; the book continues through Rudolf’s journey of restoring the rightful king to the throne, which is complicated by the fact that he has fallen in love with the king’s betrothed Princess Flavia.

With all this in mind, literary titles that featured exotic locales in Europe or the Middle East and centered around adventure, romance, and the upper classes were termed Ruritanian romances. One book that I had started to read late last year was The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

I am hoping to find more books by Anthony Hope in the future. It’s quite a shame that libraries only have his more popular book The Prisoner of Zenda and none of his other titles. If you have the luck to find a copy of Zenda, please check it out!! You won’t be disappointed!!