R. D. Blackmore, in his preface to Lorna Doone, was content to call his work a “romance,” because the historical element is only incidental to the work as a whole. Secret agents, highwaymen, clannish marauders, and provincial farmers figure against a background of wild moor country. A feeling for the old times, for great and courageous people, and for love in danger made the novel popular with Victorian readers. People who read it in their youth tend to remember it with nostalgia in later years, for the book has a penetrating simplicity. Told in the first person by John Ridd, the main character, it has an authentic ring, the sound of a garrulous man relating the adventures of his youth.

The most memorable features of this novel, which many critics believe to be Blackmore’s best, are its characterizations and its setting. The characters are drawn in the dramatic and often exaggerated fashion of the Romantic tradition, with its larger-than-life heroes, heroines, and villains. John Ridd is a powerful figure, a giant of a man whose honesty, virtue, patience, and steadfastness match his great size and towering strength. His true love, Lorna Doone, is the epitome of the Romantic heroine; she is mysterious and enchanting but entirely unrealistic. Lorna grows up pure, shy, and virtuous—a priceless pearl of femininity by Victorian standards—in the coarse and isolated environment of a robbers’ den, surrounded by a clan of thieves and ruthless...