[3] In an academically distinguished career at Oxford he obtained first-class honours in Classical Moderations (Literis Graecis et Latinis) in 1882 and in Literae Humaniores ('Greats') in 1885.

[5] Hope had time to write, as his working day was not overfull during these early years and he lived with his widowed father, then vicar of St Bride's Church, Fleet Street.

[citation needed] In 1893, he wrote three novels (Sport Royal, A Change of Air and Half-a-Hero) and a series of sketches that first appeared in The Westminster Gazette and were collected in 1894 as The Dolly Dialogues, illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

A. E. W. Mason deemed these conversations "so truly set in the London of their day that the social historian would be unwise to neglect them," and said that they were written with "delicate wit [and] a shade of sadness.

"[7] The idea for Hope's tale of political intrigue, The Prisoner of Zenda, being the history of three months in the life of an English gentleman, came to him at the close of 1893 as he was walking in London.

[9] The popularity of Zenda persuaded Hope to give up the "brilliant legal career [that] seemed to lie ahead of him" to become a full-time writer but he "never again achieved such complete artistic success as in this one book.

"[10] Also in 1894, Hope produced The God in the Car, a political story,[6] which the late nineteenth-century English novelist George Gissing thought was "of course vastly inferior to what I had supposed from the reviews".

[6] He went on a publicity tour of the United States in late 1897, during which he impressed a New York Times reporter as being somewhat like Rudolf Rassendyll: a well-dressed Englishman with a hearty laugh, a soldierly attitude, a dry sense of humour, "quiet, easy manners", and an air of shrewdness.

In 1906, he produced Sophy of Kravonia, a novel in a similar vein to Zenda which was serialised in The Windsor Magazine; Roger Lancelyn Green is especially damning of this effort.