Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins is best known as Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda: Being the History of Three Months in the Life of an English Gentleman (1894), the adventure tale that in his lifetime became a best-selling novel, a successful play in New York and London, and three popular motion pictures. The story proved so enduring that three additional screen versions were made after his death. The novel's influence on turn-of-the-century fiction in England and the United States was immense: its fictional setting, Ruritania, gave a name to a whole subgenre of adventure fiction, the "Ruritanian romance." In the short-story genre his most enduring works are The Dolly Dialogues (1894), which in the 1890s rivaled his adventure novels in popularity. In fact, when he was invited to do public readings, he was invariably asked to read from the comic and domestic Dolly Dialogues rather than his exotic...