 Title page for The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary (1917 edition) | |
| Author | Robert Hugh Benson |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical novel |
Publication date | 1906 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary is a historical novel by Robert Hugh Benson, first published in 1906. It was republished in 1956 under the title Richard Raynal, Solitary, with an introduction by Evelyn Waugh.
The novel is presented as if it had been edited from a fifteenth-century manuscript. It describes the life of Richard Raynal, an English solitary or hermit, whose quiet life is interrupted by a vision he interprets as a call from God to deliver a message to the king (seemingly Henry VI).
Although the character of Raynal is fictitious, he bears some similarity to the real English mystic Richard Rolle. Raynal travels to London to warn the king that he will face suffering and death, and as a result, the hermit is himself imprisoned in the royal palace.
In its exploration of fifteenth-century English spiritual life, the novel is particularly concerned, Waugh wrote, with "the conflicting call of solitude and contemplation with that of direct intervention—often rather drastic intervention—in the lives of others". [1] It was Benson’s personal favourite of his books. [2]
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.
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A hermit, also known as an eremite or solitary, is a person who lives in seclusion. Eremitism plays a role in a variety of religions.
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The Temple at Thatch was an unpublished novel by the British author Evelyn Waugh, his first adult attempt at full-length fiction. He began writing it in 1924 at the end of his final year as an undergraduate at Hertford College, Oxford, and continued to work on it intermittently in the following 12 months. After his friend Harold Acton commented unfavourably on the draft in June 1925, Waugh burned the manuscript. In a fit of despondency from this and other personal disappointments he began a suicide attempt before experiencing what he termed "a sharp return to good sense".
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