By Kate Rees

Last updated 05:37, Friday, 29 August 2008

The Herries Chronicles by Hugh Walpole, with an introduction by Eric Robson (published by Frances Lincoln, £7.99 each)For all those who love the drama and atmosphere of the Lake District Hugh Walpole’s Herries Chronicles (and especially the first book, Rogue Herries) should be as essential reading as Alfred Wainwright but sadly he and this magnum opus has mostly been forgotten since his death in 1941.

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Hugh Walpole

Walpole was one of the most widely admired novelists of the first half of the 20th century. His Herries Chronicles were critically acclaimed on their original publication and were bestsellers in the UK and the US.

Born in New Zealand, he lived for much of his life at Brackenburn, overlooking Derwentwater, “a little paradise on Catbells”. He dedicated Rogue Herries ‘In love of Cumberland’.

Modern readers will empathise with the Herries’ deep passion for the “beloved” fells, their sometimes gloomy and dangerous characters and breathtaking views – “rocks and steeples and slanting cliffs of shining colour, then gently in sheets of flaming bracken lifting smooth arms and shoulders embossed like shields of metal. Wild profusion, and yet perfect symmetry and order”.

And the Herries family are no less dramatic than their surroundings. Violent, self-absorbed, adulterous, not to be trusted: they are no less sympathetic for that.

Written between 1927 and 1929, the Herries Chronicles is gripping family saga set in the Lake District that tells the story of the Herries family from 1730 to 1932.

The first book, Rogue Herries, was described on its first publication by John Buchan as “the finest English novel since Jude The Obscure.”

It tells the story of the larger than life Francis ‘Rogue’ Herries who brings his family to live in Borrowdale where their life is as turbulent as the weather of the fells.

Proud, violent and impetuous Francis despises his first wife, sells his mistress at a Keswick fair and forms a great love for the teenage gypsy Mirabell Starr.

Alongside this turbulent story runs that of his son David, with enemies of his own, and that of his gentle daughter Deborah with placid dreams that will not be realised in her father’s house.

The story continues with Judith Paris. Set partly in revolutionary Paris and partly in romantic Cumbria, Judith Paris is the story of the two very different men who love Walpole’s favourite heroine, the daughter of Francis Herries and Mirabell Starr, born at the moment of both their deaths.

Judith Paris sold 20,000 copies in its first week of publication in 1931.

The third volume, The Fortress, follows Judith, now middle aged, who returns to the Lakes to deal with the bitter feud between the two branches of the family.

A feud culminating in the construction by one branch of a huge house known as The Fortress, which will dominate the land of the others.

The fourth and final volume, Vanessa described as “incomparably the best” in the Daily Telegraph, which starts with the triumph of Judith Paris’ 100th birthday in the 1870s and then moves to the tragic disillusionment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As Eric Robson says in his foreword: “To do justice to these powerful ingredients he created a new sort of romanticism... a style at once simple but also shot through with flashes of sensuous beauty.”

Walpole was inspired to write The Herries Chronicles by a “desire” to pay the Lake District back “for some of its goodness to me”: a feeling easy to empathise with after reading such inspiring prose.

Walpole was knighted in 1937. He died – from a heart attack brought on by over exertion – while doing volunteer war work in 1941 in Keswick and is buried in Keswick churchyard.