The Heart of Midlothian (1818)

All sorts of critics describe this as Scott's masterpiece: I wouldn't argue with that. By taking a working class woman as his central character, he avoids the "vacuum at the centre" we get in more conventional adventure stories. The Scottish criminal law and the city of Edinburgh put Scott on his favourite ground; 1735, with the cement of the Act of Union still setting and the religious struggles of the last century still in living memory, is also pretty much the ideal historical moment for him.
Of course, there is much a modern reader would quibble with: although the story gets going much faster than some of his others, we do have to put up with a certain amount of slow-moving (but vital) back-story in the early chapters, and the ending takes far longer to tie up all the threads than it might (and there's a shade too much poetic justice handed out). The Duke of Argyle and the sinister gypsy woman make rather one-dimensional good and bad fairy godmothers. Scott being Scott, the characters do occasionally forget themselves and start talking like books. We can put up with the little imperfections, though, because there is so much treasure in between. Jeanie and her old Covenanter father are simply wonderful characters; there are a couple of splendid comic lairds of the best sort; Scott guides us though the complicated legal and religious problems that drive the plot with unobtrusive expert knowledge.
Reflecting on the book with hindsight, the really clever thing Scott has done is to tell the story mostly from Jeanie's point of view, sidelining Effie and her lover, who might have been the obvious central characters in a romantic adventure story. They have a passionate love affair, rob, murder, make thrilling clandestine journeys, disguise their identities, etc. - and it all happens offstage. We see their whole romantic career though the eyes of the people who have to clear up the mess. When Jeanie embarks on her epic journey to London, Scott makes us see that what is remarkable about her is the absolute conviction that she is doing the right thing and will succeed. We may think her naive; another writer might have treated the whole affair with a bit more irony and thrown more obstacles in her way; but Scott accomplishes the difficult task of making a wholly virtuous character three dimensional and interesting enough to carry a whole book without becoming either nauseating or tedious. Not a lot of people can do that. ( )

It seems to me on the whole one of the best. Dumbledikes is one of the great lairds - almost as good as Ellangowans, though not quite. I suppose every one has already remarked how wonderfully Jennie escapes the common dullness of perfectly good characters in fiction. Do you think that the fact of her being uneducated helps? Is it that the reader wants to feel some superiority over the characters he reads about, and that a social or intellectual one will give him a sop and induce him to believe in the purely moral superiority? But this sounds rather too 'modern' and knowing to be true; I for one not believing that we are all such ticks as is at present supposed.
- from a 20 March 1932 letter to his brother, The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume II

[O]ne of the few Scotts...in which there's a heroine with some life in her.
- from a 20 December 1943 letter to his brother, The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume II

I think that even [Scott]'s most fanatical admirers have 'given up' his heroines (with the exception of Die Vernon [in Rob Roy] and Jeanie Deans [in The Heart of Mid-Lothian] and his love scenes. But then one gives that up in all XIX Century novels: certainly in Dickens and Thackeray. And when you have ruled that out, what remains is pure delight. Isn't it nice to find a person who knows history almost entirely by tradition? History to Scott means the stories remembered in the old families, or sometimes the stories remembered by sects and villages. I should say he was almost the last person in modern Europe who did know it that way: and that, don't you think, is at the back of all his best work. Claverhouse [in Old Mortality, say, was to Scott not 'a character' out of Macaulay (or Hume or Robertson) but the man about whom old Lady so and so tells one story and about whom some antediluvian local minister's father told another...
- from a 13 April 1929 letter to his brother, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume I ( )

I liked much of this, particular when the heroine appeals to George II's mistress for a pardon for her sister, accused of infanticide under a law that if a woman known to be pregnant could not show the baby, she was presumed to have killed it. However, I felt the ending set up the possibility of a neatly
perfect happy ending and then deliberately spoiled because Scott felt some of his characters did not deserve happiness. ( )

The ending seems to me to set up a tidy hap[py ending and then deliberately ruin it, possible for a moral lesson. Aside from that, it is well done. The picture of Scottish church politics and laws regarding pregnancy is interesting. ( )

The Scott novel that I thought the best of his work, and I have read these:
881 Waverly Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, by Sir Walter Scott (read 2 Dec 1966)
883 Guy Mannering, by Sir Walter Scott (read 11 Dec 1966)
886 The Antiquary, by Sir Walter Scott (read 5 Jan 1967)
894 Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott (read 3 Mar 1967)
895 The Heart of Midlothian, by Sir Walter Scott (read 25 Mar 1967) (Book of the Year)
898 Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott (read 26 Apr 1967)
1006 Kenilworth, by Sir Walter Scott (read 2 May 1969)
1183 The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott (read 25 Aug 1972)
1360 The Fortunes of Nigel - Quentin Durward - St. Ronan's Well, by Sir Walter Scott, bart. (read 6 Oct 1975)
1535 Peveril of the Peak - Redgauntlet - The Betrothed, by Sir Walter Scott (read 29 Sep 1979)
1612 Waverly Novels--Volume VII: The Fair Maid of Perth - Anne of Geierstein - The Surgeon's Daughter - Castle Dangerous, by Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (read 11 Jan 1981)
1790 Waverly Novels Volume VIII: The Talisman - The Two Drovers - My Aunt Margaret's Mirror - Death of the Laird's Jock - Woodstock - Count Robert of Paris, by Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (read 8 Aug 1983)
3751 Old Mortality, by Sir Walter Scott (read 4 June 2003)

895 The Heart of Midlothian, by Sir Walter Scott (read 25 Mar 1967) (Book of the Year) (SPOILER) This is the fifth Scott novel I read. It tells the story of Jeanie Deane, whose sister, Effie, was condemned to die for child murder--a lie by Jeanie could have son her acquittal--but was saved by Jeanie journeying to London and winning a pardon. Effie then runs off with George Staunton, becomes a great lady, and eventually George is killed by the very son for whose alleged murder Effie was almost executed. This story is told with a wealth of interrelated detail, of course. David Deans, a Cameronian, father of Jeanie and Effie,is developed at length--and is a scarce creditable person; likewise Reuben Butler--Jeanie's husband. But I rather liked George, though he too scarce seemed a possible person. I liked his acute conscience, when he met Jeanie at midnight to try to get her to lie to save Effie: "mad, frantic, as I am, and unrestrained by either fear or mercy, given up to the possession of an evil being, and forsaken by all that is good..." Quite a story. At the end of 1967 I found it to be the best book I read in 1967. ( )