A Novel without a Hero
Christopher Ricks, 6 December 1979
“... It is Waverley itself which defines the kind of success gained here, for it is Waverley which Donald Davie celebrated in these terms in The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott: ‘The hero in the lost-father fable has to be what Scott and the others have made him – wavering (there is a sort of pun with “Waverley”), inconstant, mediocre, weak. How else should ... ”