Anthony Hope

 Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope (9 February 1863 – 8 July 1933), was an English novelist and playwright. Although he was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels, he is remembered best for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau (1898). These works, "minor classics" of English literature, are set in the contemporaneous fictional country of Ruritania and spawned the genre known as Ruritanian romance. Zenda has inspired many adaptations, most notably the 1937 Hollywood movie of the same name.

Hope was born in Clapton, then on the edge of London, where his father, the Reverend Edward Connerford Hawkins, was headmaster of St John's Foundational School for the Sons of Poor Clergy (which soon moved to Leatherhead in Surrey and is now St John's School). Hope's mother, Jane Isabella Grahame, was an aunt of Kenneth Grahame, the author of Wind in the Willows. Hope was educated by his father and then attended Marlborough College, where he was editor of The Marlburian. He won a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford University in 1881. Before graduating in 1886, he played football for his college, took a first-class degree in Classics, and was one of the rare Liberal presidents of the Oxford Union, becoming known as a good speaker. His contemporaries included Cosmo Gordon Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury; A.E.W. Mason, author of The Four Feathers; Arthur Quiller-Couch, a literary critic; Gilbert Murray, a classical scholar and intellectual; Sir Michael Sadler, an historian and educationalist; and J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette.