Saint Ronan's Well is one of the Waverley novels by Sir Walter Scott. Set in a fashionable spa in the Scottish Borders, it is the only novel he wrote with a 19th-century setting. Composition and sources The composition of Saint Ronan's Well was somewhat erratic. Scott began it immediately after completing Quentin Durward in early May 1823, and by the end of the month more than half of the first volume had been written. It is likely that he then slowed composition to avoid exhausting the market, and the volume was apparently not completed until late August or early September. Thereafter the pace quickened again, with the second volume finished and the third under way by mid-October, but then there came another slowing, and it is probable that it was into December before all was done. It seems likely that this second hold-up was occasioned by Scott's long resistance to the demand by James Ballantyne that the reference in the text to Clara's intercourse with Tyrell should be deleted: he eventually gave in, though signs of the original intention persist in the first...