The Heart of Princess Osra

Reading through a bunch of Graustarkian novels just for fun. This one was terrible. Entirely too many men committing suicide because they can't have the woman they want, or worse, to avoid besmirching her name by being seen with her. Bleh! I wonder if I re-read The Prisoner of Zenda if I'd find it this bad.

Osra is the most beautiful princess in the world. Men fall madly in love with her. They will die for her, go mad over her, kill for her. It is over the top and ridiculous. But I just went with it and enjoyed it. I loved when she got knocked down a peg. The end was very predictable.

This lightweight and highly amusing collection of interrelated stories by the author of the more famous novel The Prisoner of Zenda, concerns the various suitors of the beautiful Princess Osra, who lived in the century before the events in Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau. They are full of all the melodramatic clichés that one would expect of a novel of of this period and are all the more enjoyable for this in between more serious reads, An amusing page turner.

If you have read the Prisoner of Zenda or other Anthony Hope books then you know what to expect. This book, however, contains little or none of Hope's adventure-writing style and is, instead, just a description of the people that fall in love with Osra's beautiful looks and then die because of it.

A collection of short stories set in eighteenth-century Ruritania --a kind of prequel to prisoner of Zenda, about a series of men who fall in love with Princess Osra. The individual stories vary in quality; some a bit grim like the first one, some silly, some gallant -- to me the best is The Sin of the BIshop of Modenstein, in which a coillateral ancestor of Rupert of Hentzau amply proves the saying that good Hentzaus (like the bishop0 fear God, and bad ones do not, but none of them fear anything in the world besides..