The Mythic Appeal of Lorna Doone

Abstract

S INCE THE EIGHTEEN-SEVENTIES, when the first Victorian tourists trudged along Bagworthy Water in search of the Doone Valley, the appeal of Lorna Doone has been firmly rooted in the soil of Exmoor.' R. D. Blackmore's imagined world grew so real that by 1889 the Doone Valley appeared on the Ordnance Survey maps, though many readers have long since challenged the accuracy of its official location. The issue became especially vexed during the centennial of Lorna Doone in 1969 when Sir Athol Oakeley tried to persuade the map makers that the real Doone Valley was not Hoccombe Combe but Lank Combe, roughly a half mile to the north.2 The romance gave a local habitation to shadowy figures of West Country history and legend; and the countryside, wonderful in itself, received the aura of a mythic landscape. For many readers, Lorna Doone, Carver, and John Ridd are presences on Exmoor, much as Tess or Diggory Venn are in Hardy's Wessex, or as the French Lieutenant's Woman is now in Lyme Regis. The concern of Blackmore's readers with finding the true Doone Valley, the waterslide, and the site of Plover's Barrows is a sign of the characters' life within the imagination. They are the spirits of a place, and the mind seeks the place that matches their reality. But their appeal is wider than Devon and Somerset and deeper than local history and legend. Lorna, John, and Carver live in the imagination partly because they are caught in a struggle of large