Richard went to Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon, and thence to Oxford University. In Lorna Doone Blackmore attained heights he never attained before or after the book, despite much trying.īlackmore’s father was a country parson, whose wife died while Richard was still a baby. But Lorna needs no description her beauty is something the reader must see in his mind’s eye – and inevitably, helped by Blackmore’s melodious prose, he sees her as perfectly beautiful. Generations of young people have thrilled to the deeds of the wicked outlaw Doones, and have sighed over the lovely Lorna and her romance with John Ridd, the enemy of the Doones.Ĭritics, who gave Blackmore a hard time with most of his books, have rightly observed that Lorna succeeds as a heroine because she embodies one of Blackmore’s basic faults as a writer – an inability to describe people so that they seem to be real. The one book that made Blackmore famous was, of course, the delightful Exmoor romance Lorna Doone. Only one of them is remembered, and but for that one, Blackmore’s name would be almost unknown in Britain today. All his life Blackmore toiled with pen and paper writing novels. It is a saying that sustains many a hopeful new novelist as he toils with paper and pen, only to find, at the end of it all, that the adage is rarely true.īut for Richard Doddridge Blackmore it was true. The vengeance of Carver Doone by C L DoughtyĮveryone, says an adage, has one good book in him.
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