Ah, The Highland Widow. Let me count the ways in which it is awesome.

First, look at that cover. We have Hesperus, not Walter Scott, to thank for that of course, but yum. (The firearms-loving consumption partner couldn’t understand why these two guns appear to be stuck in the ground. Who cares? Look [...]

For all the action I’ve given you so far, I don’t think I’ve given away really anything at all of the main plotline of the novel. If you read the book yourself, you’ll find out much faster, because Scott gives away the whole thing in his introduction. Or rather, he gives away the [...]

Yesterday, talking about some of the excellent action in The Bride of Lammermoor, I may not have mentioned that they are all also excellent scenes. One of the things most apparent for me, reading Scott for the first time, was how skilled he was. Like with Flaubert, I was reading to some extent [...]

I’d always thought of Sir Walter Scott as boring, probably due to too-early contact with the first few pages of Ivanhoe (and knowledge of its length), and when I began reading The Bride of Lammermoor I felt I was enjoying such things as I usually do anyhow, but that it was an awful [...]