‘… my heart came to my ribs, and all my blood was in my face, and pride within me fought with shame, and vanity with self-contempt for though seven years were gone … and she must have forgotten me … I felt I was face to face with fate, weal or woe, in Lorna Doone.’

He has been hurt during the climb and she tends to his injuries. One day, when he is about fourteen, he climbs a waterfall and finds himself in the hidden valley where the Doones have their settlement. John Ridd is at school when the Doones, outlaws of noble birth, murder his father. At its core a simple boy meets girl plot, it has a few neat if convenient subplots, some irrelevant meanderings and dashes of melodrama.ĭuring the reign of Charles II, the Ridds farm land on the border of Somerset and Devonshire. Hence, Blackmore’s story appears to me to be something of an anomaly. Novels, led by writers such as Dickens, Flaubert and James, were moving in other directions. ‘When I came to myself again, my hands were full of young grass and mould and a little girl kneeling at my side was rubbing my forehead tenderly with a dock-leaf and a handkerchief.’īy 1869, when Lorna Doone was published, that era was on the wane. In France, Romanticism reached its zenith in the novels of Dumas and Hugo. The Romantic Movement in literature, as in art, flourished in Britain during the early years of the nineteenth century, encompassing such important writers as Byron, Scott and both Percy and Mary Shelley. Yet in choosing its subtitle, A Romance of Exmoor, the author had something other in mind than Romance in its modern sense. Lorna Doone is the only one of his works to survive the test of time.

RD Blackmore was a prolific and popular writer of novels and poetry during the mid-nineteenth century.

Author of lorna doone