One of Scott's best on the theme of star-crossed lovers, family feuds, noble ruins, and ruined nobles. Atmospheric and psychologically intense in places, though enlivened as ever by Scott’s humorous and memorable characters and way with a plot. Though, like many of his best works, leaves you with the feeling that it has been dragged out in certain sections and shortened or rushed in others. ( )

The 8th of Walter Scott's historical novels. Set in East Lothian in 1709 - 11, it tells the story of a doomed love affair amid ugly family pride. Scotland, at the time the novel is set, was recovering from the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Union - both of which had big repercussion on Scotland, and both play their part in the background of this novel. But history is a smaller player in this novel than others in the series.
The Gutenberg editions of the Scott novels seem to be derived from later editions of the books, often with extensive introductions, many of which give background to the plot. This tends, understandably, to detract from the mystery of the plot development. This book in particular, suffered from such a spoiler in the Introduction. ( )

The young Janet Dalrymple became secretly engaged to Lord Rutherford. Her father, Lord Stair, and her mother, Dame Margaret Ross, disapproved of the young man on political and financial grounds. The young couple had sealed their engagement by breaking a piece of gold in two, each keeping half. Janet vowed that terrible things would befall her should she ever break her troth. Shortly after this, Janet's parents found a promising match for her, which Janet refused. Forcing her to confess her secret engagement, her parents nonetheless insisted upon this new alliance. Lord Rutherford objected strongly, but the engagement was broken, and Janet's half of the gold piece was returned to him.

When Janet married her new suitor, David Dunbar, she was seen to be completely passive, "... sad, silent and resigned, as it seemed, to her destiny." After the wedding feast and dancing, the couple retired to the bridal chamber. Suddenly, "the most vivid and piercing cries were heard." The company felt they should investigate. On opening the door, they found the bridegroom lying across the threshold, dreadfully wounded, and streaming with blood. The bride was then sought for: She was found in the corner of the large chimney, having no covering save her shift, and that dabbled in gore. There she sat, grinning at them, mopping and mowing... in a word, absolutely insane. The only words she spoke were 'Tak up your bonny bridegroom'. She survived this horrible scene little more than a fortnight...
Scott outlined this actual event from 1669, a story told him by his mother, in his introduction to The Bride of Lammermoor, telling his readers it is the basis for his novel. This raises a certain anticipation in the reader, for Scott is one of the nineteenth century's great story tellers. That story, however, seemed a mere premise for the novel Scott actually wrote.

The Bride of Lammermoor tells the tale of Edgar, the Master of Ravenswood, last of an ancient and noble family. Edgar does indeed become secretly engaged to Lucy Ashton, daughter of the man who had taken over the estate of Ravenswood through legal cunning. Once Scott has Edgar and Lucy engaged though, Lucy barely appears again until the end of the novel. Instead, the meat of the novel lies in Ravenswood's character and actions. Principally these revolve around Ashton's manoeuvres to secure the estate of Ravenswood, and Edgar's attempts to win it back. Scott altered the time frame, so that his events take place shortly after the Act of Union, when Scots were adapting to some new legal measures and to shifting political alliances.

Simply put, Ravenswood's psychological makeup is the old romantic Stewart side of the tale. Ashton represents the new. It's not black and white though. Scott portrays Edgar as a more complex character, torn between old and new, wanting to evolve beyond the old battle lines, but eventually throwing in his lot with his powerful relative, the Marquis of Atholl, who was himself finding his way in this new world.

There is a large cast of supporting characters. Edgar's last retainer, Caleb Balderstone, is used to inject humour, often to an annoying extent, but in the end, he is a figure of pathos, a relic of another age. Lucy's mother, Lady Ashton, rivals any [[Wilkie Collins]] heroine in evil behaviour. There are the three hags, echoing Macbeth's witches.

This is an excellent political novel and character study. However, as I read it, for the first time when reading Scott I thought I understood why he is no longer widely read. The politics, legal manoeuvres, and intrigue were perhaps too specific to a place and time for many readers. For such readers, the dramatic tension of the original story wasn't there to make up for the amount of time spent on their study.

Scott himself had worries about his novel. In a letter to his friend and publisher James Ballantyne, he said

The story is a dismal one, and I doubt sometimes whether it will bear working out to much length after all. Query, if I shall make it so effective in two volumes as my mother does in her quarter of an hour's crack by the fireside? But, nil desperandum.

I have the feeling that I didn't read this novel in a manner that would do it justice. It is only three hundred and thirty-one pages long, but has ninety-five pages of notes. For about seventy-five per cent of the book, I read each note as I went along. I felt incredibly bogged down. Then I switched to only reading them at the end of each chapter, and things picked up remarkably. After all, Scott is above all a teller of tales, and as such should never be interrupted. Next time I read this book, I will read it right through.

The first two-thirds of the book was quite engaging, but I was disappointed by the end, which felt like it had been wrapped up quickly to finally put an end to the story.

Six-word review: Vindictive mother tragically separates Scottish lovers.

Extended review:

I don't know why I've had such a difficult time trying to review this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and yet I feel, unreasonably, as if I somehow had to defend that response. Is it so absurd to love the archaic language and rambling style of a 200-year-old fiction better than most of the contemporary works I've picked up in the past year?

What's more, my pleasure in it went well beyond the story and the language and took in the physical properties of the book itself.

Not that this was by any means the oldest book I've held and read, nor was it a particularly noteworthy old edition. But it is true that I seldom read books of that vintage any more.

I didn't want to take this book back to the library. It was a real book, well handled, many times read. It's an undated edition, but my guess is that it was published in the 1930s. It's just an ordinary everyman's inexpensive hardcover of the time, solidly cloth-bound, with deckle edge, tipped-in engraved illustrations, old-fashioned typeface, a glossary of Scottish dialect in the back, and, bless me, an index so you can look up characters by scene.

I might have read the same story in a paperback issued six months ago, but it wouldn't have been the same experience.

However, I feel certain that I'd have enjoyed it in any form, so long as the author's words were preserved and no misguided 21st-century editor had decided to make it easier for a modern audience to read.

Scott's historical melodrama was allegedly based on a real incident, that of a tragic love affair between the young son of an ancient noble family and the daughter of the man who engineered the loss of his hereditary properties, bringing his dying family line to penurious ruin.

Edgar, the young Master of Ravenswood, whose ancestral home and lands have been wrested away by the machinations of Sir William Ashton, finds himself smitten by Ashton's lovely daughter Lucy. For the sake of their romance, he makes peace with his sworn enemy and exchanges a pledge of engagement with Lucy. But Lucy's mother Lady Ashton, a pitiless, domineering woman who serves no interests but her own, sets herself against the match and insists that her daughter accept her choice of a husband instead.

Against a backdrop of Scottish customs, traditions, and politics of the early 18th century, the drama plays out as a strong brew of secrets and rivalries, loyalties and vengeance, promises and betrayal, mysterious prophecies and folk superstitions, love and fidelity and deceit and loss.

If, like me, you knew this story only as the plotline of Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor, you'll find that the adaptation for opera is a loose one indeed and that only a few of the basic plot elements--a secret love affair between members of hostile families, a forced marriage, madness, and death--are drawn from Scott's far more complex, character-rich, and emotionally engaging text. The pair's romance and its narrowly missed favorable outcome, the tension between Lucy's parents, the trivial incident that sets Ravenswood's former friend against him, and the unwavering loyalty of Ravenswood's old family servant Caleb Balderstone bring depths and dimensions to the story. The solitary ordeal of Lucy, cut off from all contact with Ravenswood by her mother's cruel stratagems and subjected to unbearable psychological pressure, is truly pitiable, and it is easy to see why she is broken by it. The graveside altercation between her brother and Ravenswood steers the plot to the final tragedy.

As in other tales of star-crossed lovers--Romeo and Juliet comes to mind--the lovers' passions, both in their transports of joy and in their utter grief, bring a quality of grandeur to the finale, rendering it cathartic. The last poignant moment belongs to old Caleb, who, like us, has borne sad witness to a chain of events that it seems nothing could have turned aside. It is a credit to the art of the storyteller that we can feel uplifted by the ultimate harmony of the drama even as the tragedy touches our hearts. ( )