Unlike the heroine of the novel, she did not survive, but is commemorated in the church. One of the inspirations behind the plot is said to be the shooting of a young woman at a church in Chagford, Devon, in the 17th century. He himself attended Blundell's School in Tiverton which serves as the setting for the opening chapters. The Great Winter described in chapters 41–45 was a real event. He expended great effort, in all of his novels, on his characters' dialogues and dialects, striving to recount realistically not only the ways, but also the tones and accents, in which thoughts and utterances were formed by the various sorts of people who lived in the Exmoor district in the 17th century.īlackmore incorporated real events and places into the novel. A favourite among female readers, it is also popular among males, and was chosen by male students at Yale in 1906 as their favourite novel.īy his own account, Blackmore relied on a "phonologic" style for his characters' speech, emphasising their accents and word formation. It received acclaim from Blackmore's contemporary, Margaret Oliphant, and as well from later Victorian writers including Robert Louis Stevenson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Thomas Hardy. The following year it was republished in an inexpensive one-volume edition and became a huge critical and financial success. Blackmore experienced difficulty in finding a publisher, and the novel was first published anonymously in 1869, in a limited three-volume edition of just 500 copies, of which only 300 sold.
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