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
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.
it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly.
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.
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Eliot does the same thing with a country girl condemned for killing her child, but the woman who walks beside her to the scaffold is a preacher, not a sister.
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Antigone does the same thing for a brother, but she saves him by breaking the law, where Jeanie will not bend even the smallest part of the truth.
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Les Misérables
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Valjean walks into the courtroom at Arras and gives up his freedom rather than let a stranger be condemned by his silence, the same costly fidelity to the truth that Jeanie keeps.
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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.



