There are moments when I dare not think of it, but there are others when I rise in spirit to where she ever dwells; then I can thank God that I love the noblest lady in the world, the most gracious and beautiful, and that there was nothing in my love that made her fall short in her high duty.

He wrote Tristram of Blent in 1901 and Double Harness in 1904 followed by A Servant of the Public in 1905 about the love of acting. 'Zenda achieved instant success and its witty protagonist the debonair Rudolf Rassendyll became a well-known literary creation. Youth
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).

These works "minor classics" of English literature are set in the contemporaneous fictional country of Ruritania and spawned the genre known as Ruritanian romance. 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).