Prisoners of Hope (1898) is the first novel by the Virginia-born writer Mary Johnston. An action-adventure story and romance set in Gloucester County in 1663, the novel is based in part on the Gloucester County Conspiracy, a planned rebellion by indentured servants who intended to march to the home of Governor Sir William Berkeley and demand their freedom. The hero of Prisoners of Hope is Godfrey Landless, a convict laborer in Virginia who once fought for Oliver Cromwell. Landless takes charge in planning a servant rebellion, only to fall in love with his master’s daughter, Patricia. When his plans are revealed, Landless is imprisoned, but eventually wins Patricia’s love by saving her from a fictional band of Virginia Indians. Johnston portrays colonial Virginia much as Lost Cause writers and novelists painted the antebellum South: as an idyllic place where an enslaved African American might be viewed as “simply a good-humored, docile, happy-go-lucky, harmless animal.” Critics from London to New York praised the novel when it was released, and Johnston went on to become a best-selling author; however, few scholars study her today.

"She will reach the wharf in half an hour." The speaker shaded her eyes with a great fan of carved ivory and painted silk. They were beautiful eyes; large, brown, perfect in shape and expression, and set in a lovely, imperious, laughing face. The divinity to whom they belonged was clad in a gown of green dimity, flowered with pink roses, and trimmed about the neck and half sleeves with a fall of yellow lace. The gown was made according to the latest Paris mode, as described in a year-old letter from the court of Charles the Second, and its wearer gazed from under her fan towards the waters of the great bay of Chesapeake, in his Majesty's most loyal and well beloved dominion of Virginia. The object of her attention was a large sloop that had left the bay and was sailing up a wide inlet or creek that pierced the land, cork-screw fashion, until it vanished from sight amidst innumerable green marshes. The channel, indicated by a deeper blue in the midst of an expanse of shoal water, was narrow, and wound like a gleaming snake in and out among the interminable succession of marsh islets. The vessel, following its curves, tacked continually, its great sail intensely white against the blue of inlet, bay and sky, and the shadeless green of the marshes, zigzagging from side to side with provoking leisureliness. The girl who had spoken watched it eagerly, a color in her cheeks, and one little foot in its square-toed, rosetted shoe tapping impatiently upon the floor of the wide porch in which she stood.