Rassendyll, Sapt, von Tarlenheim and ten picked men go "hunting" nearby. She confirms that the King is being held in the castle at Zenda. Antoinette de Mauban, Michael's mistress, does not want to lose him to Flavia. Despite himself, he falls in love with her, and she with him. He learns that everyone expects them to wed. While Sapt searches for the King, Rassendyll becomes acquainted with the beautiful Princess Flavia, who is beloved by the people. Rassendyll must continue his deception, but at least Michael cannot unmask him without incriminating himself. However, when they go to retrieve the King, they find that he has been abducted. They hide the King in the cellar of the lodge and proceed to the capital. He persuades the Englishman to impersonate the King. Not showing up for the coronation would prove disastrous, but Sapt believes that Fate has sent Rassendyll to Ruritania. His friends cannot rouse him the next morning. However, his younger half-brother Michael, Duke of Strelsau, sees to it he is presented a bottle of drugged wine. The future king and his loyal attendants, Colonel Sapt and Fritz von Tarlenheim, wine and dine their new acquaintance at a hunting-lodge. On the eve of the coronation of Rudolf V of Ruritania, he encounters his distant relative, Englishman Rudolf Rassendyll, come to witness the festivities. The popularity of the novels inspired the Ruritanian romance genre of literature, film, and theatre that features stories set in a fictional country, usually in Central or Eastern Europe, for example Graustark from the novels of George Barr McCutcheon, and the neighbouring countries of Syldavia and Borduria in the Tintin comics. Fortuitously, an English gentleman on holiday in Ruritania who resembles the monarch is persuaded to act as his political decoy in an effort to save the unstable political situation of the interregnum.Ī sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, was published in 1898 and is included in some editions of The Prisoner of Zenda. Political forces within the realm are such that, in order for the king to retain the crown, his coronation must proceed. The Prisoner of Zenda is an 1894 adventure novel by Anthony Hope, in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Pulitzer Prize winners and never-before-published writers are equals during our manuscript evaluation process, whose goal is to identify and print works that promise to be, in the famous words of Ezra Pound, "news that stays news." Through its commitment to excellence, The Georgia Review has won numerous awards and earned an international reputation, and selections from its pages are regularly reprinted in the nation’s most prestigious prize anthologies.Frontispiece to the 1898 Macmillan Publishers edition, illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson Never stuffy and never shallow, The Georgia Review seeks a broad audience of intellectually open and curious readers-and strives to give those readers rich content that invites and sustains repeated attention and consideration. Each quarterly issue offers a diverse, thoughtfully orchestrated gathering of short stories, general-interest essays, poems, reviews, and visual art. Founded at the University of Georgia in 1947 and published there ever since, The Georgia Review is one of America’s most highly regarded journals of arts and letters.