The Bride of Lammermoor

Read by Prof. Claire Lamont

Sir William Ashton, a lawyer, has recently been elevated to the post of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland. This passage, from chapter 3 of the novel, reveals the family politics of his household and introduces the heroine, Lucy. In the song she sings we hear one of Scott's most celebrated lyrics.

My reasons for choosing this are 1) because I hope it will make the hearer want to read on in the novel, 2) because it gives a presence to Scott the poet within a novel, and 3) because I thought it an appropriate passage for a woman's voice. 

December 2009

Professor Claire Lamont (1942–2023) was Emeritus Professor of English Romantic Literature at Newcastle University, celebrated for her scholarship on Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. She edited key texts, won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, and greatly influenced studies of eighteenth–nineteenth-century literature.

Text used with permission of Edinburgh University Press [The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels]