Walter Scott

A deformed hermit on a Scottish moor, feared as a warlock, keeps his own counsel while a girl is carried off and a rising is plotted - and the Dwarf knows all of it, because he is not what the country people think. Scott invented the historical novel with Waverley and published for years anonymously; this short novel of 1816 was a Tale of My Landlord, and he later admitted his publisher talked him into ending it too fast.