Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore

While written in the late nineteenth century, Lorna Doone encompasses more than a decade of the 1600s in rural England. John Ridd is a farmer's son who, after a chance encounter with a young Lorna, becomes utterly enthralled with the girl and spends years pursuing her. She is ostensibly a member of the Doone clan, a family of terrors responsible for, among others, the death of John's father. Nevertheless, John purposes to persist in his wooing.

Carver Doone, who would have Lorna marry him, barricades her in her home without food for days. John rescues her and establishes her in his home. It is eventually revealed that Lorna is, in fact, a daughter of nobility who was raised by the Doones after they murdered her family, in order to gain her inheritance by marriage when she came of age. John foils all that. He leads a rebellion against the Doones, overthrowing their reign of the countryside, and he marries Lorna.

The book is rather lengthy, but I relished the comprehensiveness. In the beginning, I found John slightly distasteful, his continual self-deprecation and false modesty making a poor hero for a romantic adventure, but as I read further I discovered the humor in it all and engaged myself wholeheartedly in the story. Because it was so long, the book involved many, many plot twists, some of which were inevitably improbable. Still, I suppose it comes with the literary territory.

That Lorna was held in such a high position of impeccability did bother me a bit. Her beauty is her primary virtue, and John spends pages and pages extolling her hair, her eyes, and her figure. When he is not praising Lorna's unparalled, unimpeachable gorgeousness, John drones on about her tender-heartedness, her unflagging faithfulness, her modesty, her magnanimity—basically, her inability to do wrong. This, of course, forms an unattainable level of feminine perfection that can only be anathema to myself. I am a flawed individual, and so prefer to read about flawed individuals, especially as I have never met anyone who was anything but.

I can see how it fits into the comedy motif, though. For, of course, no one is perfect, and that John actually thinks Lorna is can only be played for laughs. While the novel had many humorous components, it had its share of poignant moments as well. Indeed, it was altogether a decent book. That it is rather obscure despitre its relatively recent inception may be due to the flaws I found in it. But Lorna Doone is essentially a good story, and a worthy work.