Redgauntlet

Two young men on the Solway sands in 1765, a laird with a fatal family face, and a third Jacobite rising that history does not record — because, Scott suggests, it fizzled out in a Solway inn with nobody willing to draw a sword. Half the book is letters, half is narrative, and the last chapter is the quietest death of a cause in English fiction. Scott put more of his own youth into it than into any other novel.