Books like Lorna Doone

This enduring 19th century classic (never out of print since it was first published) has been on my radar ever since I saw an old black-and-white film version of it as a kid; but my interest was really piqued by the 2000 BBC/A&E miniseries adaptation. (As it turns out, I would rate the fidelity of the latter to the book at only about 65%; but that's another discussion!) Recently, I nominated it as a common read in the classics group I belong to here on Goodreads, and it won the poll.Author Blackmore was a native of the Exmoor region where this novel is set, and well versed in its history and lore. Interestingly, his plot here isn't wholly invented; the exiled nobles-turned-outlaws, the Doones, were remembered in the area as having really lived, back in the days of Monmouth's rebellion (1685), as were Lorna Doone and John Ridd. With some liberties, the locations and buildings described in the book are real as well. The edition I read, the 1944 one from Dodd Mead's Great Illustrated Classics series, actually has black-and-white photographs of several of these, as well as of a contemporary portrait of Lorna herself (which shows her to be a genuinely beautiful young woman). Of course, by 1869, oral tradition recorded only the barest outlines of the events of those days; it provided the germ of the idea here, but all of the substance of the story is Blackmore's own.In style and substance, this tale is very much in the Romantic manner, with an appeal to the emotions, a setting that includes a lot of pure wild nature (with both its beauty and its danger --the bogs can be lethal), adventure, and passionate but pure love at its heart. Modern readers might question whether John and Lorna fall for each other too readily and quickly, since they haven't actually had much interaction by the time they fall in love (that's not a spoiler, since we know from the Goodreads description that they do!). In the historical context, however, I would say that this isn't unrealistic. Young people in that era didn't date (and didn't expect to); they took for granted that they had to size each other up seriously in what limited interaction they had, and didn't require as much time to make up their minds. (They also were socialized to be psychologically open to the idea of marriage and commitment as a natural and positive thing, not a horrible fate to be evaded and staved off as long as possible.) John's first-person narration has, at times, a strain of dry, often unconscious humor; and John is himself an interesting character: honest to the core, a cross between naivete and peasant shrewdness, slow to anger but really formidable when he's roused (he's well over six feet tall, and strong in proportion), magnanimous to a fault, much smarter than he lets people think, with plenty of virtues to admire and a few foibles that make you occasionally want to swat him. The other characters are wonderfully drawn and brought to vivid life, too, and the family relationships and other personal interactions are as real as life (and, like life, sometimes entail some painful lessons). Blackmore's well aware that even good people aren't perfect. He manages to give the reader a feel for the rhythms and routines of 17th-century farm and community life, for the role of simple Christian faith in the character's lives, and the folkways of a vanished rural culture. And he's to be commended, IMO, for daring to depict a love that crosses two of the most yawning chasms that divided 17th --and 19th-- century English society (poor commoner vs. wealthy nobility, and Protestant vs. Catholic --though he doesn't develop the latter theme as much as the former).As a rule, 19th-century diction in a novel doesn't bother me. Here, though, the author's style is SO digressive and orotund that it can at times be irritating. He's also consciously writing (because of the first-person narration) in a style that's meant to seem Jacobean, and so archaic even in Victorian times; and he reproduces West Country dialect, especially in the speech of the less-educated characters, very meticulously, and that style of speech can be quite difficult to understand in places. His narrative pace is also somewhat slow, in a plot that spans the years from November 1673 to 1685 and after (the opening chapters are, or seem, particularly slow-paced, since the reader isn't, at that point, already drawn in and used to the style); given that this is a 646-page novel, that makes it a slow read. There are places where the plotting, IMO, could benefit from being tauter. Given these considerations, a judicious editor could probably have cut the length by 100 pages, and improved the book. Concealed identity is a common plot trope in Romantic fiction from this era, but Blackmore doesn't handle it very well here. (view spoiler)[Lorna supposedly has no memory of being kidnapped at seven or eight years old, which is implausible, especially when she can still recognize her former nurse! (hide spoiler)]