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The Heart of Mid-Lothian
Sir Walter Scott

In the Library

The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Sir Walter Scott, 1818

Form
Form Novel
Difficulty
Difficulty Demanding
Reading time
Reading time 17 hours
Chapters
Chapters 56
Length
Length 232k words

£1.99

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it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly.

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About the book

Effie Deans is to hang for a murder nobody can prove happened. A Scots statute of savage neatness needs no body and no witness, only a hidden pregnancy and a vanished child, and it collapses the instant one person swears that she was told. Her sister Jeanie was told nothing. Jeanie loves her, and Jeanie will not say the words, and having refused she borrows what money she can and walks to London to ask the Queen for a life instead. Barefoot most of the way, shoes kept clean in her bundle for the towns. Scott gave the Waverley novels lairds and outlaws and kings; here he hands the whole moral weight of a nation to a cowfeeder's daughter who cannot be moved and cannot be flattered, and who tells Queen Caroline, in her own broad Scots, that at the end it is not what we have done for ourselves that we think on most pleasantly. The Tolbooth prison gave the book its title. Jeanie is what it really means.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian, in the bookshop · The Daily Canon