John Sutherland's new critical biography is an undertaking of major importance in which he penetrates into the darker areas of Scott's life in a sceptical (yet sympathetic) spirit,

This is a comprehensive collection devoted to the work of Sir Walter Scott, drawing on the innovative research and scholarship which have revitalised the study of the whole range of his exceptionally diverse writing in recent years.

Modern biography can be said to have begun with John Gibson Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart in 1838. But Scott - the 'Great Unknown' - has always presented challenges to the biographer. Layers of myth (much of it manufactured by the faithful son-in-law Lockhart) continues to protect him from posterity. There is also the sheer size of Scott's achievements as poet, novelist, man of letters, and self-made Laird of Abbotsford. The two standard lives - Lockhart's, and Edgar Johnson's published in 1970 - run to some three-quarters of a million words apiece. Finally, there has been the precipitate slump in Scott's general popularity: he is now the great unread. John Sutherland's critical biography attempts to penetrate into the darker areas of Scott's life in a sceptical spirit, bringing the massive oeuvre and the chronicle of the life into manageable and readable proportions. Sutherland justifies Scott as a writer to be read and known today as much as in his heyday in the 19th century.