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.

This is an impressive work, one that can be enjoyed by fans of the historical novel, the gothic novel and the novel of ethnic character--provided they accept "The Bride" as a not completely effective fusion of the three and are willing to adjust their expectations accordingly.

The essential plot--the story of the dispossessed Master of Ravenswood (now living on top of a promontory overlooking the sea in a half-ruined castle) and how he falls in love with the daughter of his mortal enemy, eventually leading to madness and murder and the fulfillment of an ancient family prophecy--is fiercely romantic, as are Scott's descriptions of the castle of Wolf's Crag and the surrounding countryside. At the same time, the starkness of this wild gothic tale is illuminated and qualified by a rich political context and lightened considerably in tone by humorous Scots stereotypes--particularly that of Ravenswood's faithful majordomo Caleb. I found the resulting hybrid both unique and effective. (Although I must admit I could have done with a little less Caleb. Okay, I admit it: a lot less Caleb).

Also . . . I believe--correct me if I'm wrong--that this is the finest novel ever written during a series of debilitating gall bladder attacks.

Beware the Ravenswood!

This is a must read for fans of the genre....a classic gothic romance!

This Gothic tale has it all....witches, women going mad, a family fallen from grace, degenerative castles, ruined fortunes, Byronic heros, star crossed lovers, a dark prophecy, ominous symbology...everything! It is MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Wuthering Heights all rolled into one. I wish Goodreads would let me give 1/2 stars as I would rate this one 3.5 stars....
See my full review here

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.

From BBC Radio 4 - Classical Serial:
Mike Harris adapts Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor.

The novel is set in the Lammermuir Hills of south-east Scotland at the beginning of the 18th Century and tells of a tragic love affair between young Lucy Ashton and her family's enemy Edgar Ravenswood.

The Ashtons and Ravenswoods have been enemies for centuries - but will a proposed union between the warring families finally bring peace?

Music Composed and performed by Ross Hughes and Esben Tjalve
Violin and viola - Oliver Langford

Written by Mike Harris
Produced and Directed by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4.

I truly thought my whole life would pass without any Walter Scott, but I picked up this paperback for pennies at a sidewalk sale because I'm drawn to old paperbacks. There it sat along with all my other sidewalk sale finds until I reread Madame Bovary, which contains a scene in which Emma and Charles Bovary attend a performance of Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor, which is loosely based on this novel. (Another novel whose occupants attend this opera is Where Angels Fear to Tread.) So then I watched, or half-watched, half-listened, to the opera on Youtube, and decided to read the book.

I was expecting this to be all doom and gloom and drama, but au contraire, the mood constantly shifts back and forth from that to comedy. There are parts that are extremely funny. These are the parts not having to do with hags, sibyls, and apparitions, which I could frankly do without.

From the back of my edition: "John Buchan considered it the most perfect of his novels 'in one way...for the sense of marching fatality is unbroken by any awkwardness of invention, or languor of narration'; and even the scenery had taken a less inanimate part and become like 'Egdon Heath in Mr. Hardy's The Return of the Native, almost a protagonist in the tale.'

3.5 / 5

A Scottish political romance, unevenly paced (the last 50 pages FLEW by) but redeemed by a truly spectacularly chilling final paragraph

I was slow to get into this one and I know I missed a lot. Very strong Romeo and Juliet vibes to me, but that's my own opinion and not researched or confirmed.

The highly romantical tale of twa lovers in Scotland.

I'm gonna say it: the real source of the Game of Thrones books is the sensibilities of Scott's series of melodramatic quasi-historical Waverly novels. Case in point, there is a description of a freaking Red Wedding in the backstory of this book. Family against family, backstabbery for political machinations, greed that rends friendships, family mottos...no dragons, no wolves. But witches, ghosts, and...is there even quicksand of Scotland?

The style is something of a drawback. It's loose, rambling, and eminently skimmable, with whole pages of yuck-em-up slapstick comedy from the lower classes.

If George R.R. Martin had these books in mind when he wrote Game of Thones, I wouldn't be surprised. They REALLY needed an update.

Recommended if you like actual Gothic tales like The Monk. Otherwise this might be a bit of an eye-roller.

1819...so much drama

Cloaks swirl, ladies go mad, rocks fall, everyone dies. Full review coming!

Una vecchia leggenda narra di uno spirito della fontana che, uscito dalle acque, irretì un giovane cavaliere rubandogli l’anima e la vita.

Si dice che l’ultimo dei Ravenswood perirà a causa di una giovane donna morta di cui lui ne chiederà la mano.

“Quando di Ravenswood l’ultimo erede
Una morta fanciulla in moglie chiede
Il Kelpie col cavallo se lo inghiotte
E sul nome si fa eterna notte”

"When the last Laird of Ravenswood to Ravenswood shall ride,
And woo a dead maiden to be his bride,
He shall stable his steed in the Kelpie's flow,
And his name shall be lost for evermoe!"

Ill-fated lovers from rival families, an old prophecy threatening to come true, an imperious blind sybil, three malicious old crones straight out of MacBeth and the usual soup of sectarian political maneuvering, The Bride of Lammermoor is everything you would want in a Waverley novel, and something less - which is not a bad thing!

Let me explain.

As though conscious of his own long-windedness, which I guess contemporary critics must have been pointing out, Scott opens up his tale with his narrator answering a charge from his friend that his characters "make too much use of the gob box ... there is nothing in whole pages but mere chat and dialogue."

Having read a fair few of these novels now, I call that a fair charge. I wouldn't for a moment want the dialogue of the low born characters to be compromised because I adore the earthy lyricism of the Scotch dialect they use, best represented here by the proud seneschal Caleb Balderstone; but the stilted circumlocutions of the aristocratic characters can be a little trying, so it's a positive plus point for the narrative that these were cut short.

There may not be a significant historical event backdropping the plot to add some extra spice to the story this time around, but the two families at the heart it, the Ashtons and the Ravenswoods, assuredly sit on opposite sides of the Jacobite struggle.

Based on a true story the settings, as always with Scott, are also fictionalized versions of actual places and monuments.

The dilapidated Wolf's Crag, castle of the novel's hero Edgar Ravenswood, was modeled on Fast Castle, which once stood on the very tip of the Berwickshire coast, and a more dramatic location for a doomed dynasty would be harder to find (have a look for it online).

Prime Waverley.