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Sir Walter Scott
SAINT RONAN'S WELL(1823) Reviewed by Patrick Killough I. For amazon.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Bigamy is bad enough for a bigamist. But, oh, what it does to his sons! NOTE: The "Saint" in SAINT RONAN'S WELL is usually, but not always, abbreviated to "St." in printed book titles. In searching amazon.com ST. RONAN'S WELL produces many hits, SAINT RONAN'S WELL very few. END NOTE. Sir Walter Scott wrote a famous Introduction to his 1823 novel SAINT RONAN'S WELL. In it he describes the novel as "light literature." It follows "a plan different from any other that the Author has ever written." What is so different? SAINT RONAN'S WELL is not historical in the way IVANHOE, QUENTIN DURWARD and even WAVERLEY are. These are historical in that Scott, father of the historical novel genre, had to rely entirely on reading and research for the romances farthest back in time, while for the more recent settings prior to SAINT RONAN'S WELL he could flesh out printed records with boyhood recollections of tales told him by very old men who had been active in the "risings" of 1715 and 1745. SAINT RONAN'S WELL, by contrast, is set in Scott's own lifetime and draws on his own experiences at many country inns in Scotland and at some spas built around healing waters. The novel is set in Sir Walter's own mid-life time and is almost entirely detached from the great events of England's struggle with Napoleon. The Wizard of the North clearly found it a relief not to have to portray accurately in a work of fiction greats of history such as Mary Queen of Scots, Saladin, Richard the Lion Heart and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Sir Walter is conscious that he is invading a genre of novel hitherto the province of perceptive ladies such as Jane Austen. All his characters are make believe. And he shapes them lovingly and memorably. The time is summer and autumn sometime before 1815. The place is southern Scotland at a reasonably fashionable hotel very recently built thanks to the interest of an officious Lady in its nearby healing waters associated with Saint Ronan in former Roman Catholic days. The plot is driven by two marriages a third of a century earlier by a titled Englishman, one in France, not publicized, to a titled Frenchwoman, a second later in England to a titled Englishwoman. Both unions produced sons. Both marriages ended with the death of the husband. In other words the second marriage was bigamous and its offspring illegitimate. Trouble is that the second son inherited his father's title. As life ended, the father regretted his deception and sent the first son, Francis (Frank) Tyrrel, proof of his legitimacy. Both Frank and half-brother, Valentine Bulmer, Lord Etherington, arrive in the vicinity of Saint Ronan's village, spa and waters with their eyes out for nubile (or is she?) Miss Clara Mowbray, the ward of her impoverished noble, hothead brother John. Does one brother get the girl? Does the Earl keep his title? The tale is avoidably tragic and I will reveal no spoilers. There are many comic characters and interludes, an absent-minded, vastly learned but kindly Presbyterian minister, a domestic spy close to Lord Etherington, a canny, unforgettable innkeeper, Meg Dods. and a cast of silly men and women who frequent the new hotel associated with the healing waters. Keep your eye on Mr Touchwood, an immensely wealthy nabob who had once met and befriended Frank Tyrrel in Smyrna (Turkey). Several people's hells are paved with Touchwood's good intentions. -OOO- =-=-=-=-=-=-= II. For barnesandnoble.com Title of this review: Problem of Bigamy and Marriage to a disguised Groom Take at look at MORE SCOTT OPERAS, Chapter XVI, "St. Ronan's Well." That is English Professor Jerome Mitchell's 1996 supplement to his 1977 THE WALTER SCOTT OPERAS. Mitchell finds nine dramas based on Sir Walter Scott's 1823 novel ST. RONAN'S WELL. These include four operas. In depth Jerome Mitchell analyzes the lost 1874 work, LA CONTESSA DI S. RONANO by Cesare Bordiga, music by Ottavio Frangini. I mention Mitchell because the common note among the titles he lists is the female love interest in Scott's novel, the young Scottish noblewoman Clara Mowbray. Italian operas have their own peculiar slant on way on Sir Walter Scott. They simplify. They focus on love and they cannot say no to tragedy. The parallels in both novels and operas is particularly striking regarding the heroines Lucy Ashton (THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR, Donazetti's LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR) and Clara Mowbray. There is vastly more to Scott's two tales than in either opera. And the operas do not necessarily focus on the aspects of the tales that remain the longest with admiring readers of the Wizard of the North. Two half-brothers, one by a bigamous second marriage, contend for the love of Clara Mowbray. There are legal obstacles and the conscience of the young men's father that make a happy ending almost impossible. I will not spoil your enjoyment of an immensely complicated yarn with more about the plot. But there are other, subordinate characters I want you to meet: --Meg Dods, spinster proprietress of the Cleikum Inn in the decaying village of St. Ronan. The inn had "a huge sign, representing on the one side St. Ronan catching hold of the devil's game leg with his episcopal crook ... and on the other the Mowbray arms." The Mowbrays were the baronial family for which Meg's parents had once worked and who had sold their home and surrounding lands which Meg now controlled. Six or seven years before story's beginning (in the early 1800s), Meg had entertained for a season two teenage "cousins," Valentine Bulmer and Francis (Frank) Tyrrel. They were English but were then studying in Edinburgh. The return of Tyrrel to southern Scotland sets the novel in motion. Meg is tough, worldly, demanding, quick-tempered but with a heart of gold and a soft spot for young Tyrrel. --Captain Hector MacTurk is one of the guests at the recently built hotel that draws much custom away from the mile and a half distant Cleikum inn. The Captain's specialty is to encourage others to fight duels (not with him) and then to see that they become friends afterward. Duels play a large role in this novel. --Peregrine Touchwood is called "the nabob" by denizens low and high. Much traveled, he had one time loaned money to Frank Tyrrel when both were traveling in Ottoman Turkey. Keep your eye on him. He is a born meddler, with the best of intentions. And if the novel takes an avoidably tragic turn, he is not without blame. --Reverend Josiah Cargill is the resident Presbyterian pastor of St Ronan's Auld Town. His church itself was auld, elegant in form,"having been built in Catholic times, when we cannot deny to the forms of ecclesiastical architecture that grace which, as good Protestants, we refuse to their doctrine." He is a scholar, easily absorbed by his studies of the Holy Land. But he had once, against his better judgment, witnessed a clandestine wedding. When he hears that the brother of the then bride may soon announce a new, bigamous marriage, he confronts the new suitor. There are quite a few other characters, none of historical importance, but all serving to advance or comment on the evolving tragedy. -OOO- =-=-=-=-=-=-=- III. For epinions.com Title of this review: Bigamy is bad. Marrying the wrong boy is even worse. Two teen-age half brothers, Frank Tyrrel and Valentine Bulmer, are sent from England by their father, the Earl of Etherington, to study in Edinburgh sometime around 1800. They spend a summer at a country inn on the border, hunting and larking. Frank, the older boy, falls in love with Clara, a local girl of the prominent but financially decaying Mowbray family. A scholarly, absent-minded Presbyterian minister, Reverend Cargill, is persuaded to marry the two teens clandestinely, on Valentine's lying assertion that Clara is pregnant. But Valentine also loves Clara and would also like to land his brother in trouble with their doting father. Frank is the product of an earlier private but valid marriage in France to a French noblewoman. So Valentine pretends to be Frank and marries Clara instead. The church is dark. It is night. Clara thinks she is marrying Frank. The rest of the novel plays out this boyish prank over the next seven or eight years. Can there be a happy ending? Read this fiendishly complicated novel and find out! As icing on this Gothic cake, there is much more to the novel than its plot. There is, for one thing, insightful commentary on Scottish strengths and foibles. Thus Valentine, the younger English half brother, now an adult and inheritor of his father's title, schemes to wed Clara legally and openly in order to solidify his shaky claims to an Earldom and to win more property under the strange terms of a relative's will. Recuperating from a gunshot wound inflicted by Frank Tyrrel, this Lord Etherington writes to a supporter about the Scottish dimension of John Mowbray, Clara's brother and guardian: "They
(Scots) are a shrewd people, indeed, but so destitute of ease, grace,
pliability of manners, and insinuation of address, that they eternally
seem to suffer actual misery in their attempts to look gay and
careless. Then their pride heads them back at one turn, their poverty
at another, their pedantry at a third, their mauvaise honte at a fourth
... Excellent bankers the Scots may be, for they are eternally
calculating how to add interest to principal; -- good soldiers ... ; --
lawyers they are born; indeed every country gentleman is bred one ...
." (Ch. XIX)
The supporting cast abounds in the sort of colorful characters who would become Dickens's stock in trade. There is fiercely independent innkeeper Meg Dods and her guest, "the nabob" Peregrine Touchwood, world traveler and onetime befriender of Frank Tyrrel. Touchwood loves to do good but only after he has wormed out the secrets others would rather not reveal. Captain Hector MacTurk is among the faintly seedy clientele of the new modern inn set up near healing waters a mile and a half from Meg Dods's ancient Cleikum Inn in the Auld Town. MacTurk loves to arrange duels -- for other people --in the kindly conviction that afterwards they will be the best of friends. Reverend Josiah Cargill is too absent-minded for this world but a Christlike servant of the poor when their needs come to his attention. His role in the novel is quiet and almost unnoticed, but crucial to both beginning and tragic conclusion. This is the only non-historical novel among Sir Walter Scott's 27. All characters are fictional. Deliberately imitating Jane Austen and other female novelists whom he greatly admired, Sir Walter was not encumbered by having to deal accurately with real heroes of history. In SAINT RONAN'S WELL there is no Mary Queen of Scots or her great, great great grandson Bonnie Prince Charlie, King Richard I, the Lion Heart or Queen Elizabeth. There are a few nobles, a lawyer, a painter, innkeepers, parvenus, climbers, snobs and eccentrics. And these minor characters all move the plot along, comment on it and often add humor. At heart SAINT RONAN'S WELL is a sad, sordid tale of what happens when an English lord has bigamous marriages and cannot do justice to the sons of those unions. If there is a moral it is, Bigamy is bad! Scholars have uncovered a factual basis for the bigamies and false weddings in legal cases which came to the attention of Scott the lawyer. And the parallels cannot be missed between the innocent young women, Clara Mowbray and Lucy Ashton, "the bride of Lammermoor." Pros: Social climbers oblivious to the war with Napoleon. Demonstration that marriage is not for triflers. Cons: The broad lowland Scots spoken by innkeeper Meg Dods and others. You need a glossary. The Bottom Line: If you enjoyed THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR, don't miss SAINT RONAN'S WELL. Parents or guardians do major injustice to young women. When marriage becomes a game, innocents suffer. Overall Product Rating: **** FOUR STARS See also http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/well.html |