The scene in which the drama unfolds is that of Exmoor, which overlaps Devonshire and Somerset, and has a mystique and rich history worthy of study by itself. The time of the drama is in the 17th c.
What a backcloth in which to write a story! However, Blackmore was not just a fiction writer, even if it is accepted that 'Lorna Doone' is fiction, for he was called to the Bar in , and was a classical master at Wellesley House School, Twickenham. His childhood and youth, however, was spent in the cradle of 'Doone Country'. The fact is that there were many 'Doone Relics' in the hands of a Mr.
Beeton at Hunstanton, including a 'Journal of Rupert Doone'. However, many of these were lost in a fire at Mr. Beeton's premises in An antiquary, Mr. Snowdon Ward, was allowed to examine and photograph what was left, and he seems to have been of the opinion that they were indeed very old and connected with a Scottish Doone family. A gun, said to have been used to shoot one of the Doones, and called the 'Yenworthy Gun', can, apparently, be seen to this day.
The Scottish link is important, because it is held that the Doones returned to Scotland in , they being reputed to have settled on Exmoor in There seem to have been many persons who claimed relations with the main families appearing in the book, who have given their own stories. Added to these are various stories of outrages that have been handed down by word of mouth, seemingly connected to the 'Doone' era. An Ida M. Browne Audrie Doon wrote an article, in , which she contributed to the West Somerset Free Press, and the publishers of that journal deemed the matter to be so important that they issued the article as a pamphlet.
It goes:. PREFATORY NOTE Since my first visit to the West of England in , it has occurred to me that it would be of no little interest to those visiting the neighbourhood, to have some idea as to who were, in reality, the original outlaws mentioned in Blackmore's charming romance, and it seemed that I, a member of the Scottish family from which they sprang, should be the one to write it.
It occasioned me no small surprise, on perusing 'Lorna Doone' for the first time to find its author had embodied the traditions of my progenitors so correctly, and I was still further surprised and interested to discover on visiting the haunts of my ancestors, that the story of the Doone family was one of the best known legends of the locality.
A considerable amount of mystery, however, will hang over them, and by many their real existence is regarded as entirely fictitious. My family may, or may not, have sprung from these, but the facts are plain that their name was Doon subsequently spelt with a terminal 'E' for a few generations and originally written Doune , that they were exiled from Scotland in , and that they settled in what is now known as the Oare Valley, and were more or less hated and feared by the country side until their return to Perhshire in Such is the story attached to our family, and I give it for what it is worth.
Anyone taking the trouble to look up in Burke the history and lineage of the line of Moray will see that in Elizabeth Countess of Moray - eldest daughter of the Earl of Moray who was murdered on January 23rd, - married Sir James Stuart of Doune, whose father was created Lord Doune on November 24th, , and he assumed, thereupon, the title of Earl of Moray, being known in history by the appellation of the Bonny Earl of Moray.
Blackmore has made use of - being a man of vindictive, quarrelsome, and immensely proud disposition. From the age of eighteen, constant friction existed between the brothers as to the legal ownership of the title and estates of Doune Castle, situated near Stirling, in Perthshire. At this distance of time it is difficult to determine whether or no Sir James was the rightful heir, or if Ensor Stuart were indeed the elder.
In those rough times, a mortal enmity naturally arose between the two, and the brothers grew to cherish for each other a hatred as strong as nursed by the famous families of Verona.
On consulting Burke once again, the reader will see that on February, 7th, , Sir James was murdered by his hereditary enemy , the Earl of Huntley, a friend of his brother, and it was commonly supposed on good grounds that Ensor had paid the impoverished Huntley a considerable sum to assassinate Sir James. So awful a deed, although no absolute proof was forthcoming, strengthened the hatred between the two families.
James, second Earl of Moray, succeeded his murdered father, and through the King's mediation, was reconciled with Huntley, which seemed fresh evidence that, in reality, Ensor Stuart was the instigator of the outrage, and was more guilty than the man bribed.
The Earl's hatred to his uncle increased, and, on Ensor Stuart's death, he became on no better terms with his cousin. Sampson Low Jnr, against the judgement of the rest of his firm, resolved to risk publishing it as a single volume. From , the fame of Lorna Doone snowballed and the book has never since been out of print, although Blackmore always insisted that he made very little money from it.
After the success of Lorna Doone , Blackmore tried more novels over the next years, but none came even close in popularity. He was always frustrated by this situation, as he put his very best endeavours into each successive book. He wrote several more in the same genre of rural romance, each with a female name as the title, and each set in a new region of the country.
Inserted in the sequence was Cripps the Carrier , Oxfordshire. He then changed his emphasis, and wrote three novels with a village as a title and as the theme of the plots: Christowell , Dartmoor , Springhaven , Newhaven, Sussex , Perlycross , Culm valley, East Devon. A book of short stories: Tales from a Telling House was published in These were tales from Exmoor and contained the story Slain by the Doones , under which title the book was published for the American market.
Blackmore himself died at Teddington in after a long and painful illness, and was buried next to his wife. Four years after his death a memorial to him was erected in Exeter Cathedral. The result of work by a committee including his good friend, Thomas Hardy, plus Rudyard Kipling, and James Barrie, it bore an address written by another writer from Devon, Eden Phillpotts.
A reduced copy of the memorial was also mounted in Oare Church; above it was a stained glass window depicting David, Jonathan, and Samson - the archetypes of courage, love, and strength, respectively. Blackmore was one of the most read novelists of his generation. He won literary merit and acclaim for his vivid descriptions of the countryside and sympathy with, nature. He shared with Thomas Hardy a strong sense of regional setting in his works and acted as pioneer of the new romantic movement in fiction that continued with Robert Louis Stevenson and others.
Today even Lorna Doone is not well read, although it has been abridged as a children's story and has had many film and television adaptations. It is mainly considered as a 'good yarn' but not necessarily good literature as it is somewhat wordy for modern tastes.
This is a great pity as his descriptions of nature were masterly and his use of local dialect and portrayal of ordinary people and their work were pioneering. Blackmore, David. Lorna's Author: The life and character of R.
Blackmore , Chester, Blackmore Books 32 p. Lorna's Author: R. Blackmore the novelist , Chester, Blackmore Books 32 pp. Lorna's Author: Glimpses of R. Blackmore's personal life , Chester, Blackmore Books 19 p. Lorna's Author: A sermon by the father of R. Blackmore , Chester, Blackmore Books 16 p. Lorna's Author: Letters by R. Does the book flow and keep you captivated, or does it have lots of description and unneeded info like a Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo book?
I don't mean to sound uneducated or lazy, but I'm looking for a semi easy read, like a Jane Austen or a Charlotte Bronte kind of book. Patti Guptill There is a fair amount of description - of the seasons and his surroundings - it's really quite wonderful - the main character keeps saying what a blo …more There is a fair amount of description - of the seasons and his surroundings - it's really quite wonderful - the main character keeps saying what a blockhead he is, and yet his descriptions are beautifully poetic.
See all 4 questions about Lorna Doone…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Lorna Doone. The story is narrated by the protagonist, John Ridd. And Blackmore has taken great pains to make him a reliable narrator.
He had approached the narrative in such a way that no partiality could be attached to it. Every important event in the story whether it placed the protagonist at an advantageous position or at his detriment, has been honestly and truthfully portrayed.
For my part, I enjoyed this fair and balanced account of the story. The story, as I mentioned before, is both a romance and adventure. The romance is a sweet love story between the young John Ridd and beautiful Lorna Doone which grows little by little from their childhood.
Blackmore has taken it to his heart how this romance should be. It is a little sentimental perhaps. Nevertheless, the charming and passionate writing draws the reader into their life and love. The adventure part of the story is a mixture of true historical events of the Monmouth rebellion and young John Ridd's battle with the group of outlaws to protect his home, his farm and his neighbourhood from their brutality. This, however, is not a heart-racing and action-packed adventure, but a slow and steady one.
It was a little surprising for I consider an adventure to be a bit fast-paced. But equally surprising is seeing me enjoying the slow-paced adventure nevertheless. This is nothing short of a miracle for I cannot recall having enjoyed a slow-paced adventure this much before. And all the credit for my forbearance lies in Blackmore's captivating writing. Since I mentioned Blackmore's writing quite often I have to say that I have not read such mesmerizing writing for quite some time.
The poetic beauty and sing-song quality in his writing touched me profoundly. I can honestly say that I have only seen equal skill in the usage of language and writing in one other writer, and he is Thomas Hardy.
Both being so sensitive towards nature and surroundings, their writing and their stories are so alluring. The set up being the countryside of South West England, Blackmore brings to light the charming lives of farmers and the undisturbed natural habitat of Exmoor thorough his beautiful and captivating descriptions.
In this backdrop, Blackmore brings out a simple protagonist in John Ridd. He is the hero, but an unusual one. Without making a perfect hero, Blackmore brings in a slow-witted yet physically strong hero, who is a farmer and a professional wrestler - an uncommon combination. However, this imperfect character brings realism to the story and enables the reader to connect with him instantly. His charming love interest Lorna is a character that balances between reality and imaginary thus giving a fairy tale quality to the story.
The placement of these characters and all the other contributing characters are so well done that the overall effect is quite charming. I can go on and on about this beautiful and mesmerizing piece of literature for I think I'm quite bewitched. I have read a young adult version of this long ago and remember enjoying it. But the complete novel is nothing short of perfection.
I was quite taken in with the lives, love, and adventure of the Exmoor and was loathed to leave it and the Plovers Barrow, the cozy little home of John Ridd. It was one of the most melancholic literary partings that I have ever undergone. There is nothing more left to say. That I loved this beautiful novel is proved beyond a doubt. To all who could endure a slow-paced adventure combined with a sweet romance set up against a beautiful backdrop of 17th century Exmoor, Lorna Doone is just for you.
View all 5 comments. Sep 19, Werner rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Fans of 19th century Romantic novels. Shelves: historical-fiction , classics. Recently, I nominated it as a common read in the classics group I belong to here on Goodreads, and it won the poll.
Author Blackmore was a native of the Exmoor region where this novel is set, and well versed in its history and lore. Interestingly, his plot here isn't wholly invented; the exiled nobles-turned-outlaws, the Doones, were remembered in the area as having really lived, back in the days of Monmouth's rebellion , as were Lorna Doone and John Ridd. With some liberties, the locations and buildings described in the book are real as well. The edition I read, the one from Dodd Mead's Great Illustrated Classics series, actually has black-and-white photographs of several of these, as well as of a contemporary portrait of Lorna herself which shows her to be a genuinely beautiful young woman.
Of course, by , oral tradition recorded only the barest outlines of the events of those days; it provided the germ of the idea here, but all of the substance of the story is Blackmore's own. In style and substance, this tale is very much in the Romantic manner, with an appeal to the emotions, a setting that includes a lot of pure wild nature with both its beauty and its danger --the bogs can be lethal , adventure, and passionate but pure love at its heart.
Modern readers might question whether John and Lorna fall for each other too readily and quickly, since they haven't actually had much interaction by the time they fall in love that's not a spoiler, since we know from the Goodreads description that they do!
In the historical context, however, I would say that this isn't unrealistic. Young people in that era didn't date and didn't expect to ; they took for granted that they had to size each other up seriously in what limited interaction they had, and didn't require as much time to make up their minds.
They also were socialized to be psychologically open to the idea of marriage and commitment as a natural and positive thing, not a horrible fate to be evaded and staved off as long as possible. John's first-person narration has, at times, a strain of dry, often unconscious humor; and John is himself an interesting character: honest to the core, a cross between naivete and peasant shrewdness, slow to anger but really formidable when he's roused he's well over six feet tall, and strong in proportion , magnanimous to a fault, much smarter than he lets people think, with plenty of virtues to admire and a few foibles that make you occasionally want to swat him.
The other characters are wonderfully drawn and brought to vivid life, too, and the family relationships and other personal interactions are as real as life and, like life, sometimes entail some painful lessons. Blackmore's well aware that even good people aren't perfect. He manages to give the reader a feel for the rhythms and routines of 17th-century farm and community life, for the role of simple Christian faith in the character's lives, and the folkways of a vanished rural culture.
And he's to be commended, IMO, for daring to depict a love that crosses two of the most yawning chasms that divided 17th --and 19th-- century English society poor commoner vs. Catholic --though he doesn't develop the latter theme as much as the former.
As a rule, 19th-century diction in a novel doesn't bother me. Here, though, the author's style is SO digressive and orotund that it can at times be irritating. He's also consciously writing because of the first-person narration in a style that's meant to seem Jacobean, and so archaic even in Victorian times; and he reproduces West Country dialect, especially in the speech of the less-educated characters, very meticulously, and that style of speech can be quite difficult to understand in places.
His narrative pace is also somewhat slow, in a plot that spans the years from November to and after the opening chapters are, or seem, particularly slow-paced, since the reader isn't, at that point, already drawn in and used to the style ; given that this is a page novel, that makes it a slow read. There are places where the plotting, IMO, could benefit from being tauter. Given these considerations, a judicious editor could probably have cut the length by pages, and improved the book.
Concealed identity is a common plot trope in Romantic fiction from this era, but Blackmore doesn't handle it very well here. John's narration is interlarded with irksome sexist comments; and while Lorna's no milksop, RDB does portray her very much in passive, damsel-in-distress mode, and he has a penchant for making her and other females faint or be prostrated by emotional stress, since their "weak" feminine nervous system can't handle such things and needs to be more sheltered.
The miniseries was much more enlightened in its handling of female characters than the actual book is. Altogether, these flaws cost the book a fifth star; but I still really enjoyed it overall, and felt that it earned its four! View all 15 comments. Aug 20, Misfit rated it it was amazing Shelves: 19c-lit. What an awesome tale. Our hero, John Ridd is a simple, albeit wise and honorable farmer who as a young lad meets Lorna Doone of the dreaded, evil outlaw family of higher born Doones, and it's love at first sight.
There are lots of ups and downs and surprises, along with the author's gorgeous prose describing the english countryside and farmlife. You have to pay attention though, as n What an awesome tale. You have to pay attention though, as none of the characters are wasted. What might seem as inconsequential events and characters earlier in the story are brought back in full circle to the tale, along with a great mystery about Lorna's past as the author slowly peels out the many layers of his story.
Highly highly recommended. View all 16 comments. May 23, Sean Kennedy rated it did not like it. I was surprised at how much I struggled with this book. I love my nineteenth century literature, and I absolutely love the last TV adaptation although it seems they took the best parts of the book and eradicated all the filler but there were times I was almost ready to give up on this.
It just so happened that then a scene would come along to distract me and hold my attention and then be followed by fifty pages of sheer boredom. Not to mention that the characters are all unlikable. John Ridd is I was surprised at how much I struggled with this book. John Ridd is a bully who thinks too much of himself, whips the man who works for him with the slightest whim, hates the sister who challenges his manly authority and stalks pretty Lorna Doone until she can do nothing but accept his strange version of love.
Lorna herself is insipid and can hardly even manage the simple act of walking while talking without needing to rest because it makes her feel faint. The gender roles are appalling. The mother and the 'good' sister fawn all over John and cater to his every wish and command, while the 'bad' sister is disliked because she has a brain and wants to use it.
I'm telling you, when you actually feel more for the characters who are rapists, murderers and thieves, you're in a lot of trouble. I'm going to stick to the TV version, thanks. And I think this is the only time a movie has been superior to its source material. View all 4 comments. Shelves: historical-fiction , classics , england , reviewed , romance , sweet-and-clean-g-to-pg , medieval-renaissance-tudor , owned , top-twenty-all-time-favorites , swashbucklers.
Just as good the third time round as the first! I can't say anything that hasn't already been said so I'll just say what I liked and why. Blackmore's descriptions of the countryside and the Doone's valley are some of my favorite parts.
One of my favorite chapters is chapter 8, where we first see inside Doone Valley. Next we have Tom the highwayman with his strawberry horse Jenny. What a pair. Tom manages to be endearing even when he's a thief with an eye for finery. Lorna Doone has a sweetn Just as good the third time round as the first! Lorna Doone has a sweetness that over rides even sweet Annie, John's sister.
And Ruth Huckaback my favorite character. Such a lovable little redhead! Now since I don't know what to say I'll add a picture from my other favorite chapter, chapter Sep 03, K. Shelves: read-with-bookgroup , absolute-favorites , blood-and-morality-tales , regency-and-victorian-british-era.
So beguiled. If you are the type of reader who might find great joy in listening to an old man telling his long and rambling love story of a life imagine a comfortable fireside setting, cushy chairs, popcorn and cocoa then you will adore this book.
If you're the type of reader who would be impatient, bored or even annoyed in such a setting, you will not enjoy this book so leave it alone rather than revile it. Reader, you m 3rd Review February Read again to beguile the winter days. Reader, you must be prepared to wander. You must be inclined to be patient in the telling. You must be willing to delight in bygone days imagined.
You must be eager for a jaunt back in time, reveling in the difference from the slowness of then to the hurry of now. You must be content with deciphering dialect or skipping the undecipherable.
You must be disposed to worship the adorable Lorna with her devoted John, or at least try to understand why he does Does anyone love your love as you do? This is one long, long ramble of the love of a man for a woman. It is the sweetest of love stories. It will sweep you up and carry you away. Add to Bookshelf.
Lorna Doone By R. Oct 25, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Paperback —. About Lorna Doone First published in , Lorna Doone is the story of John Ridd, a farmer who finds love amid the religious and social turmoil of seventeenth-century England. About R. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady. Samuel Richardson. Tom Jones. Henry Fielding.
Felix Holt, the Radical. George Eliot. Great Expectations Movie Tie-In. Charles Dickens. The Vicar of Wakefield. Oliver Goldsmith.
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