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Read only after having finished the book yourself: this 'review' (plot summary) contains major spoilers!
A truly tragic love story about blind prejudice and persecution. Edgar Ravenswood falls deeply in love with Lucy Ashton, and they pledge to remain true, even breaking a gold coin, each of them keeping half. This despite the fact that Lucy's father has just dispossessed the former owner of Ravenswood Castle, Edgar's father, who dies just as the novel opens. However, when Edgar saves the father and daughter from an attack by a mad cow, things start to thaw between the new Lord Keeper and his daughter and the poor Edgar, who has virtually nothing left other than Wolf's Crag, a broken down part of his father's former estate. Indeed, after a hunting expedition, Edgar is forced to serve as host to the father and daughter despite the fact that there is virtrually no food in the place. This gives rise to the comic highlight of the novel in which his servant, Caleb Balderston, goes to the nearby hamlet and, while no one is looking, makes off with a brace of wild fowl which were then being cooked over an open fire. Upon the return of the imperious Lady Ashton, Edgar is banished from their home, and all communication between the loving couple is severely curtailed by the mother, who deems Edgar's line too ancient and thus a threat to her own relatively newly established dominance - which she wields over her henpecked husband and petrified-with-fear daughter. She even brings in a witch, one Dame Gourlay, who uses magic to falsely show Edgar pledging his love to another in a mirror while he is away on the continent. Lady Ashton forces her daughter to marry Bucklaw, a newly landed nobleman with manners more of the serving than the ruling class, and when Edgar reappears to challenge Lucy's new decision, her mother strips her of the half coin around her neck. On their wedding night, Bucklaw is stabbed, though not fatally, on his marriage bed and Lucy found catatonic in the fireplace, wearing a blood-besoaked shift. She succumbs to her nervous disorder and dies two or three days later. Her brother challenges Edgar to a duel, claiming he was responsible for his sister's death. On his way to this event, Edgar's horse throws him and the body disappears in quicksand. The father and brother die soon after, leaving only Lady Ashton to live on to a ripe old age, never feeling any responsibility for the lives her blind prejudice led her to ruin. No hint of relaxation of the grim tragedy is allowed to seep through this, the most disturbingly depressing of all the Waverly novels I've read to date.
A truly tragic love story about blind prejudice and persecution. Edgar Ravenswood falls deeply in love with Lucy Ashton, and they pledge to remain true, even breaking a gold coin, each of them keeping half. This despite the fact that Lucy's father has just dispossessed the former owner of Ravenswood Castle, Edgar's father, who dies just as the novel opens. However, when Edgar saves the father and daughter from an attack by a mad cow, things start to thaw between the new Lord Keeper and his daughter and the poor Edgar, who has virtually nothing left other than Wolf's Crag, a broken down part of his father's former estate. Indeed, after a hunting expedition, Edgar is forced to serve as host to the father and daughter despite the fact that there is virtrually no food in the place. This gives rise to the comic highlight of the novel in which his servant, Caleb Balderston, goes to the nearby hamlet and, while no one is looking, makes off with a brace of wild fowl which were then being cooked over an open fire. Upon the return of the imperious Lady Ashton, Edgar is banished from their home, and all communication between the loving couple is severely curtailed by the mother, who deems Edgar's line too ancient and thus a threat to her own relatively newly established dominance - which she wields over her henpecked husband and petrified-with-fear daughter. She even brings in a witch, one Dame Gourlay, who uses magic to falsely show Edgar pledging his love to another in a mirror while he is away on the continent. Lady Ashton forces her daughter to marry Bucklaw, a newly landed nobleman with manners more of the serving than the ruling class, and when Edgar reappears to challenge Lucy's new decision, her mother strips her of the half coin around her neck. On their wedding night, Bucklaw is stabbed, though not fatally, on his marriage bed and Lucy found catatonic in the fireplace, wearing a blood-besoaked shift. She succumbs to her nervous disorder and dies two or three days later. Her brother challenges Edgar to a duel, claiming he was responsible for his sister's death. On his way to this event, Edgar's horse throws him and the body disappears in quicksand. The father and brother die soon after, leaving only Lady Ashton to live on to a ripe old age, never feeling any responsibility for the lives her blind prejudice led her to ruin. No hint of relaxation of the grim tragedy is allowed to seep through this, the most disturbingly depressing of all the Waverly novels I've read to date.
