Ivanhoe stands among the notable works of Walter Scott, a Scottish novelist, poet, and historian whose writing was shaped by the currents of the Romanticism movement.

Scott was born in Edinburgh on 15 August 1771, and received his education at the Royal High School before continuing at the University of Edinburgh. He worked as a lawyer and served as a judge, occupations that ran alongside his literary life. His early creative energies found expression in poetry: the narrative poem Marmion appeared in 1808, followed two years later by The Lady of the Lake in 1810. These works placed him within the Romanticism movement and demonstrated his capacity to work in verse before he turned sustained attention to prose fiction. Waverley is among his notable works in that form, as is Ivanhoe. He wrote in English and worked across several forms — novelist, poet, historian, playwright, and literary critic — in the course of a single career. In 1820 he received the title of baronet.

The range of his output reflected both his professional life and his literary ambitions. He produced work across poetry, fiction, and historical writing, each form running alongside the others rather than supplanting them. Scott's association with Romanticism connected him to a broader movement that drew on history, landscape, and national tradition as sources for literary imagination, and his own writing engaged consistently with those materials.

Scott died on 21 September 1832 at Abbotsford House. His notable works — among them Waverley, The Lady of the Lake, Marmion, and Ivanhoe — represented the span of his engagement with both verse and fiction across the decades of his career. The Lady of the Lake, published in 1810, remained one of the concrete markers of his achievement in narrative poetry, a form he had pursued before prose fiction claimed the larger portion of his effort.