View Message

Haven't read Marmion - not my fave period - but i've got a feeling it's a sort of historical novel in verse. Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish novelist and poet who was active at the end of the 18th - start of the 19th century; his output was prolific and his style is dated for us, but he was megapopular in his day (and had to be prolific in order to clear some debts that he wasn't responsible for in law but felt he was). There's a story about a group of friends having dinner in Edinburgh and one of them looked out of the window and noticed a man sitting in shadow, writing page after page by candle light, and commented on some lawyer's clerk doing tedious copying - and the host, who knew the neighbourhood, said gently: That is the hand of Sir Walter Scott!

---

I read Heart of Midlothian and liked it, read Kenilworth and understood it better, tried Waverley and bounced off it. Good to know he's not completely forgotten, I suppose.

---

In that Avonlea discussion the other day, people were remembering the Anne of Green Gables books - in them Anne has a taste for romantic landscapes, heroines in floating garments, etc and she reads Scott with great delight.