Author Biography
Anthony Hope was born Anthony Hope Hawkins on February 9, 1863, in Clapton, London, England. His father was a minister and headmaster of a school. His mother was the aunt of Kenneth Grahame. Anthony was educated by his father and eventually won a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford, training as a lawyer. Working in that vocation, he found time to write short articles, then self-published his first novel in 1890. He wrote The Prisoner of Zenda in a single month in 1893, drawing praise from Robert Louis Stevenson and Andrew Lang. Over the span of his life, Hope wrote 32 works of fiction, gaining a huge following. He married Elizabeth Somerville in 1903 and they had three children. He died on July 8, 1933, from throat cancer, at the age of 70, in Walton-on-the-Hill, Surrey, England.