Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Huguenot Historical Fiction

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is famous for his Sherlock Holmes adventures but what may be of interest to readers of this blog is a less well-known work of historical fiction: The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents (also titled: The Refugees: A Tale of Huguenot Persecution), originally written in 1892 and published in 1893. He is among many who have been inspired by the history of the French religious wars, and the Huguenot diaspora, to write a romantic novel based on the story of courageous French Huguenots. Doyle explains in a preface that he wrote this book after he "had finished a course of reading in connection with the dispersion and the wanderings of the Huguenots....But the noblest of all were the Huguenots, and the best that I could wish for my book would be that it should bring home the virtues and the sufferings of these people to some to whom they were unfamiliar. Some short account of the ultimate fate of the wanderers I have added in the form of an Appendix." As the original subtitle indicates, the story takes place both in France and in New France (French Canada). There are many excellent examples of historical fiction about the Huguenots in the literary world. This particular worthy contribution is not to be overlooked. Doyle wrote:

I take a New Englander, a Puritan, as one type of the seventeenth century, and a New Yorker, the woodman, as another, and I precipitate these two into the court of Louis XIV, and mix them up in the European history of that time - very much as Scott threw Quentin Durward, the young Scotchman, into the French court. I have taken a lot of pains to make these two types exact studies. Then I shift the scene back to America. It will be something new in the way of an American historical novel. You see it will be the story of the two continents. The woodman will use the phrases of the wood, and the New Englander is rather Biblical.