Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore (Hardcover 1968) Heron Books

Blue boards with gilt inlay, no dust jacket, 560 Pages

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RICHARD DODDRIDOR BLACKMORE was born on June 7th, 1825

Lat Longworth in Berkshire. His father was the Reverend John Blackmore, curate of the parish; his mother whom he never knew, for she died three months after his birth- was the daughter of the Reverend Robert Knight, vicar of Tewksbury.

Soon after her death the Reverend John Blackmore moved to Ashford, near Barnstaple north Devon, where he re-married. The future author spent much of his early life with his maternal grand-mother, Mrs. Knight, at Newton House, Glamorganshire.

He received his first schooling at Bruton in Somerset, and later entered the famous Blundell Foundation School at Tiverton, of which he was to give a vivid description in Lorna Doone. He was most unhappy at school where he suffered such ill-treatment at the hands of other boys that his health remained permanently impaired. From school, he passed on to Exeter College as a classical scholar, graduating in 1847. The same year he met at St.

Helier, Jersey, Lucy Maguire, a young Irish lady and a Roman Catholic whom he married against the wish of his clerical relatives in 1852, the year in which he was called to the bar.

(His marriage proved a most happy one; it ended with his wife's death thirty-six years later.)

For a little while he practised as a conveyancer, but soon abandoned this work owing to ill-health and obtained a post as assistant schoolmaster at Wellesley House School, Hampton Road in the parish of Twickenham. During this period he began his literary career with the publication of two anonymous volumes of poetry: Poems by Melanten (1854) and Epullia (1855).

In 1857 he came into a substantial legacy from his mother's estate which enabled him to realise his ambition of combining a literary career with that of a market-gardener and fruit grower.

He acquired a house and estate in Teddington-on-Thames where he lived for the remainder of his life, writing his novels and cultivating his pears, apples, peaches, his roses and strawberries.

In the years from 1855 to 1862 he published further volumes of poetry, among them a translation in verse of the first and second Georgics of Virgil, and in 1864 his first novel Clara Vaughan appeared anonymously. It was a sensational romance of murder and ghosts of the kind with which Wilkie Collins and others had