Apparently, Blackmore invented the name "Lorna", possibly drawing on a Scottish source. Unlike the heroine of the novel, she did not survive, but is commemorated in the church. One of the inspirations behind the plot is said to be the shooting of Mary Whiddon on her wedding day at the parish church of Chagford, Devon, in the 17th century.
He himself attended Blundell's School in Tiverton which serves as the setting for the opening chapters.
The Great Winter described in chapters 41–45 was a real event. He expended great effort, in all of his novels, on his characters' dialogues and dialects, striving to recount realistically not only the ways, but also the tones and accents, in which thoughts and utterances were formed by the various sorts of people who lived on Exmoor in the 17th century.īlackmore incorporated real events and places into the novel. Development of the novel īy his own account, Blackmore relied on a "phonologic" style for his characters' speech, emphasising their accents and word formation. A favourite among females, it was also popular among male readers, and was chosen by male students at Yale in 1906 as their favourite novel. George Gissing wrote in a letter to his brother Algernon that the novel was "quite admirable, approaching Scott as closely as anything since the latter". It received acclaim from Blackmore's contemporary, Margaret Oliphant, and as well from later Victorian writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Thomas Hardy.
The following year it was republished in an inexpensive one-volume edition and became a huge critical and financial success. Publication history īlackmore experienced difficulty in finding a publisher, and the novel was first published anonymously in 1869, in a limited three-volume edition of just 500 copies, of which only 300 sold. In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's survey The Big Read. It is a romance based on a group of historical characters and set in the late 17th century in Devon and Somerset, particularly around the East Lyn Valley area of Exmoor.
Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor is a novel by English author Richard Doddridge Blackmore, published in 1869.
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