In the Library
The Bride of Lammermoor
Sir Walter Scott, 1819
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 9 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 36
- Length
- Length 126k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Vacant heart, and hand, and eye, / Easy live and quiet die.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights does the same thing on wilder ground: a dispossessed heir, a woman who marries the safe man, and a house that forgives neither of them.
£1.99
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Hardy called this an almost perfect specimen of form, then built Tess the same way, a gentle woman ruined by everyone who claims to want her happiness.
£1.99
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
James Hogg
Hogg does the same thing with Scotland's other inheritance, trading the family prophecy for predestination and letting a young man be argued, politely and patiently, into damnation.
£1.99
About the book
A gold coin is broken in half beside a spring in the Lammermuir hills, and two people whose families are enemies promise themselves to each other over the water. He is Edgar Ravenswood, last of a fallen house, who swore at his father's graveside to be revenged on the lawyer holding his lands. She is that lawyer's daughter. Scott wrote nothing else as dark as this, and the violence in it is domestic: no battle, no siege, only a mother working on a gentle, dutiful girl day after day until there is nothing left of her to defend. The comedy beside it is glorious, an old servant smashing the last of his master's crockery and blaming the thunder sooner than let a guest discover there is no dinner in the house. Scott dictated most of it from a sofa, groaning between sentences in gallstone agony, and afterwards said he could remember none of it. Donizetti found the most famous mad scene in opera here, and it begins with letters that never reach the man they were written for.