Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (Oxford World's Classics)

Lorna Doone is the story of how John Ridd, an unsophisticated farmer, falls in love with the beautiful and aristocratic Lorna Doone, kidnapped as a child by the outlaw Doones on Exmoor.
First published in 1869, Lorna Doone was praised by Thomas Hardy, R. L. Stevenson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins in the nineteenth century and has remained constantly in print. The novel is multi-faceted: it is a romance, a historical novel set at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion in the seventeenth century, and a new development in the pastoral tradition. Underneath an ostensibly idyllic evocation of rural bliss and a tale of love and high adventure lies a solid defence of Victorian social values, and, in John Ridd's often humorous and self-deprecating narration, a problematic image of a 'manly' hero whose inward doubt prompts him constantly to prove his own masculinity to himself.