The question has recently been raised as to whether or not the order of the publication of the Waverley Novels is also, as Lockhart implies, the order of writing. Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, writing in the New York Saturday Review of Literature for April 23, 1932, (p. 686), appeals to lovers of Scott for help in the solution of the problem of the chronology of his novels. She states her reasons for believing that St. Ronan's Well, though later revised, was written seventeen years before Waverley. In a similar communication published in the London Times Literary Supplement for April 28, 1932, Dame Una Pope-Hennessy outlines the genesis of her skepticism as to the usually accepted chronology of Scott's novels:
Hitherto it has been assumed that novels issued from Scott's head much as Athena issued from the head of Zeus, full-panoplied for action. … Now, after re-reading and consideration, I incline to think that in Scott we have a novelist from boyhood, temporarily diverted by the study of ballads and the fashions of the hour to writing poetry, and then, when the poetic vein had been sufficiently worked, going back to his first love, prose.