Other editions of book The Heart of Midlothian; Old Mortality

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Sir Walter SCOTT (1771-1832), son of Walter Scott, a Writer to the Signet, was born in College Wynd, Edinburgh, educated at Edinburg High School and University, and apprenticed to his father. He spends part of his childhood in the rural Scottish Borders at his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe. Here he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny, and learned from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that characterised much of his work. He was called to the bar in 1792. At the age of 25 he began to write professionally, translating works from German. His first publication being rhymed versions of ballads by Gottfried August Bürger in 1796. He then published a three-volume set of collected ballads of his adopted home region, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. In 1820, Scott was created baronet. Scott´s influence as a novelist was incalculable: he established the form of the “Historical Novel”, and the form of the short story with “The Two Drovers” and “The Highland Widow”. He was avidly read and imitated throughout the 19th cent, and there was a revival of interest from European Marxist critics in the 1930´s, who interpreted his works in terms of historicism. Postmodern tastes favoured discontinuous narratives and the introduction of the "first person", yet they were more favourable to his work than Modernist tastes. Scott is now seen as an important innovator and a key figure in the development of Scottish and world literature. “A Legend of Montrose” (1819). The action happens in Scotland in the 1640s during the Civil War, during the Earl of Montrose's 1644-5 Highland campaign on behalf of King Charles I against the Covenanters who had sided with the English Parliament in the English Civil War. It forms, along with The Bride of Lammermoor, the 3rd series of Scott's Tales of My Landlord

This novel, regarded as one of Scott’s finest, opens with the Edinburgh riots of 1736. The people have been infuriated by the actions of John Porteous, Captain of the Guard; when his life is saved by the distant monarch they ignore the Queen and resolve to take their own revenge. Closely connected with these events is the story of the novel’s heroine, Jeanie Deans, a peasant girl of remarkable religious faith. Like the people of Edinburgh she refuses to accept a legal decision, in this case against her sister Effie, condemned under a harsh law of child-murder. The novel follows Jeanie’s prodigious determination to save her sister’s life. At the centre of both narratives is Edinburgh’s forbidding prison, the Tolbooth, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian.