Lorna Doone (Oxford World's Classics Series): A Romance of Exmoor

Book Description
Lorna Doone relays the perenially popular story of John Ridd and his love for the beautiful and aristocratic Lorna Doone who was kidnapped as a child by an outlaw family. This version remains the only critical edition of a work which, since 1869, has never gone out of print.


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Historical romance by R.D. Blackmore, published in 1869. Set in the wilds of Exmoor (northern Devonshire, Eng.) during the late 17th century, the novel concerns the adventurous life of the yeoman John Ridd and his love for Lorna Doone, a beautiful maiden. Blackmore considered the novel a romance and studded it with the high adventure, dramatic set pieces, bloody villainy, and obstacles to love that characterize the genre.


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"First published in 1869, Lorna Doone was praised by Thomas Hardy, R. L. Stevenson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins in the nineteenth century and has remained constantly in print. The novel is multi-faceted: it is a romance, a historical novel set at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion in the seventeenth century, and a new development in the pastoral tradition. Underneath an ostensibly idyllic evocation of rural bliss and a tale of love and high adventure lies a solid defence of Victorian social values, and, in John Ridd's often humorous and self-deprecating narration, a problematic image of a 'manly' hero whose inward doubt prompts him constantly to prove his own masculinity to himself.


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