Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (1884-1941) was an English novelist. He was born in Auckland in New Zealand and educated in England at the King's School, Canterbury and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He worked as a teacher before turning to writing full time. His first novel was The Wooden Horse (1909), with Fortitude (1913) his first great success. He worked for the Red Cross in Russia during World War I, experiences which fed his The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919). Walpole lived at Brackenburn Lodge on the slopes of Catbells in the Lake District from 1924 to his death. Here he wrote many of his best known works including the family saga The Herries Chronicle, comprising Rogue Herries (1930), Judith Paris (1931), The Fortress (1932) and Vanessa (1933). Walpole's work was very popular, and brought him great financial rewards. He was a prolific worker who embraced a variety of genres. He also wrote: The Prelude to Adventure (1912), The Golden Scarecrow (1915), The Captives (1920), and The Cathedral (1922).

Jeremy and Hamlet by Hugh Walpole

1927\. Walpole wrote horror novels that tended more towards the psychological rather than supernatural, with a brooding underlying mysticism. Among his important novels is the semi autobiographical series that includes Jeremy, Jeremy and Hamlet, and this volume, Jeremy at Crale. The book begins: Young Cole, quivering with pride, surveyed the room. So, at last, was one of his deepest ambitions realized. It was not, when you looked at it, a very large room. If, as was the way with many of the other Studies, it had had a table in the middle of it, there would have been precious little space in which to move. But he and Gauntlet Ma, almost at once after their arrival last night, had come to an agreement about this. They would have their own tables in their own corners, leaving the middle of the room free-and Marlowe could lump it. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.