General information

Publication date: 1819

Edition used: Oxford World's Classics, Ed. Fiona Robertson. Oxford UP: New York, 1991.

Time and Place of Setting: Reign of James VI of Scotland or later ; East Lothian near the sea

Plot: Generally regarded as a Gothic novel.

How it fits in with my project

• Not very chorographical, but does still spend time describing places in great detail, especially the Ravenswood castle and the Ashton estate
• Example of Scott's storytelling style - one major plot line, but happy to digress to smaller stories especially concerning family history and often in relation with space/place (the Ravenswood fountain, home of the nymph-lover of Malisius de Ravenswood, who came to a sinister end and since then the fountain has been fatal to the Ravenswood family - 58-59)
• Scott's distance from the text: invents characters who tell him the fictional story (Dick Tinto), invents his own editor/narrator (Peter Pattieson), refuses to state an opinion on possible supernatural events and always presents multiple theories (Malisius' lover could have been a nymph, or might have been a peasant girl whom he slew in a fit of rage and invented the supernatural story to cover it up)
• The story itself - see passage above from Fiona Robertson's introduction

Significant Passages

From Fiona Robertson's introduction to the 1991 Oxford World's Classics Edition:

"The historical introduction and notes written for the Magnum Opus edition of the novel present the reader with a different kind of researcher and local historian: Scott himself. He is the most convincingly personalized of all the narrators of the Waverley Novels, but in many ways he is also the most partial and interested. This new introduction cites folk legends and satirical verses about the Dalrymple history, emphasizing that they constitute opinion and point of view rather than verifiable fact. Instead of fixing the novel by declaring its historical sources, Scott adds to the reader's sense that the story must always remain open and incomplete. His new introduction grants no absolute authority to historical records. Indeed, it shows again that one story generates another, and that there is no such thing as a disinterested historian . Similarly, the long notes which Scott inserted at the ends of chapters are whimsical and arbitrary as well as informative. The note which tells the story of the servant John, for example, is far from being an adequate justification for the account of Caleb's depredations on the Girders' kitchen, which it is introduced to support. The note on the 'Poor-Man-of-Mutton' is an excuse to tell an amusing story about the barriers of custom and rumour between the English and the Scots. These notes are stories in themselves, subject to the same play of internal verification and the same inconclusiveness as the main text, and they continue rather than replace the suggestions about the conditions and limitations of narrative which Scott first conveyed through the frame-narrative of Pattieson and Tinto."

!

See Authenticity