It is probably set in 1715, the year of the first Jacobite rising, and the social and economic background to that event are an important element in the novel, though it is not treated directly.

He is the son of an English merchant who parted from his family home in the north of England near the border with Scotland when he was a young man, being of different religion and temperament than his father or younger brother.

John Ballantyne, Scott's literary agent, drew up a contract for Rob Roy on 5 May 1817 with Archibald Constable and Longman who had published the first three Waverley novels, the author having lost confidence in the publishers of his most recent fictional work Tales of my Landlord, John Murray and William Blackwood, who had turned out to be insufficiently committed to that project.

Bailie Jarvie was suggested by another book he owned: The Highland Rogue: or, the Memorable Actions Of the Celebrated Robert Mac-gregor, Commonly called Rob-Roy [by Elias Brockett] (1723).

[5] The first edition, in three volumes, dated 1818, was published in Edinburgh on 30 December 1817 by Archibald Constable and Co. and in London on 13 January 1818 by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.

[citation needed] Robert Louis Stevenson, however, who loved it from childhood, regarded Rob Roy as the best novel of the greatest of all novelists.

Chapter 3: On the road, Frank encounters a traveller (who is later identified as Morris) with a particularly heavy portmanteau and teases him by encouraging his fears that he might be intending to rob him.

Chapter 4: The travellers are joined in the inn at Darlington by a Scottish gentleman called Campbell (later identified as Rob Roy) with a shrewd manner of speaking as he declines to accompany Morris as a protector.

Chapter 6: At dinner, Die comments caustically on five of her surviving cousins and tells Frank that the sixth, Rashleigh, is to leave home for a career with Osbaldistone and Tresham.

Escaping from the circulating bottle, Frank encounters the gardener, Andrew Fairservice, who expresses his disapproval of the family's Roman Catholicism and Jacobitism.

Chapter 11: During a boring Sunday at Osbaldistone Hall, Rashleigh tells Frank that, following a decree by her late father, Die is destined to marry Thorncliffe, the second oldest of the brothers, or to enter a cloister.

She asks that they continue as friends and hands him a letter from his father's partner, Tresham, announcing that Rashleigh has left for Scotland with large bills payable to individuals there.

Chapter 8 (21): After overhearing Fairservice talking about him in unflattering terms to an acquaintance, Frank meets his summoner, Campbell (Rob Roy), on the bridge and is conducted to the tolbooth.

Chapter 9 (22): Frank finds Owen in the tolbooth, committed at the behest of a firm which had worked closely with Osbaldistone and Tresham until made aware of its problems.

After receiving a letter from Die, Rob indicates that if Frank and Jarvie come to see him in the glens he may be able to help with the problem created by Rashleigh, the bills falling due in ten days' time.

Chapter 5 (31): The survivors of the skirmish are brought before Helen whose sons, James and Robert, arrive and announce that Rob has been taken captive by Galbraith with his Lennox militia.

They rejoin the clan and Rob, after indignantly rejecting Jarvie's offer to oversee his sons as apprentice weavers, repays a substantial loan from his cousin.

Frank goes north to take possession of Osbaldistone Hall and learns from Inglewood that Die's companion was actually her father, Sir Frederick, who had been publicly declared dead.

Chapter 12 (38): Frank is joined in the library by Die and her father, who are fugitives from the government, but their presence is carelessly divulged by Fairservice to Clerk Jobson's spy.

The eponymous Rob Roy is badly wounded at the Battle of Glen Shiel in 1719, in which a British army of Scots and English defeat a Jacobite and Spanish expedition that aimed to restore the Stuart monarchy.

Rob Roy was written at a time when many Europeans started regretting colonialism and imperialism, as reports circulated back of horrendous atrocities towards indigenous cultures.

It was also a time when debates raged about the slave trade, the working class started to demand representation, and, more relevant to the novel, the disastrous effect of the Highland Clearances.

During this era, William Wordsworth wrote The Conventions of Cintra, praising Spanish and Portuguese resistance to Napoleonic forces; Lord Byron would go on to praise Amazonian women in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, inverting the "polite" norms of femininity that the modern "civilized" world placed on them; and, finally, Scott would write about similar events in The Vision of Don Roderick.

The characters were generally admired, though a degree of caricature was sometimes detected; several reviewers pointed out that some of them bore a distinct resemblance to characters in the preceding novels (Die to Flora in Waverley, Helen to Meg Merilees in Guy Mannering, and Fairservice to Dandie Dinmont in Guy Mannering and Cuddie Headrigg in Old Mortality) but they mostly noted significant variations which meant they were not mere repetitions.

For example, although a 1995 film is based on the same eponymous hero, Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson, Tim Roth, and Jessica Lange, it has no other connection with the novel.

In 1960, the Gateway Theatre in Edinburgh presented a musical adaptation of Scott's novel by Robert Kemp, with songs by Ian Robertson.