The Ladies Lindores, Vol. 1 (of 3)
A young man returns to his Scottish estate after years away, only to find that home has meant something different in his absence. John Erskine comes back to Dalrulzian ready to reclaim his heritage, but the house he remembers has become someone else's belonging. Nora Barrington, whose family has tended these grounds during his absence, must now surrender the home she loves to its rightful owner. Oliphant writes with quiet devastation about the way memory betrays us, not even our childhood homes remain as we left them. This is a novel about inheritance in every sense: of property, of community, of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. The Scottish setting provides both rustic dignity and melancholy distance, as old hierarchies shift and new arrangements must be negotiated. Oliphant, one of the Victorian era's most prolific and versatile novelists, brings her psychological acuity to questions of identity and belonging that feel startlingly contemporary. For readers who cherish the interior dramas of Trollope or the Scottish social comedies of Susan Ferrier.
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“No 'Middlemarch' for me," said Miss Barbara, with a wave of her hand. "I am too old for that. That means I've read it, my dear”
— Mrs. Oliphant
“THERE are few things in human affairs more curious than the structure of what is called society, wherever it is met with, whether in the most primitive of its developments or on the higher levels. The perpetual recurrence of a circle within which the sayings and doings of certain individuals are more important than anything else in earth or heaven, and where the conversation persistently rolls back, whatever may be its starting-point, to what this or that little knot of people are doing, to the eccentricities of one and the banalities of another, to some favorite individual scene of tragedy or comedy which forms the centre of the moral landscape, is always apparent to the observer, whether his observations are made in Kamtchatka or in London, among washerwomen or princesses. But under no circumstances is this so evident as to a new-comer in a region where all the people know each other.””
— Mrs. Oliphant
“But it would be vain to attempt to describe the struggle that followed: that domestic tragedy would have to be told at length if told at all, and it included various tragedies; not only the subjugation of poor Carry, the profanation of her life, and cruel rending of her heart, but such a gradual enlightening and clearing away of all the lovely prejudices and prepossessions of affection from the eyes of Lady Lindores, as was almost as cruel. The end of it was, that one of these poor women, broken in heart and spirit, forced into a marriage she hated, and feeling herself outraged and degraded, began her life in bitterness and misery, with a pretence of splendor and success and good-fortune which made the real state of affairs still more deplorable; and the other, feeling all the beauty of her life gone from her, her eyes disenchanted, a pitiless, cold day-light revealing every angle once hid by the glamour of love and tender fancy, began a sort of second existence alone. If””
— Mrs. Oliphant
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Oliphant, Mrs.. The Ladies Lindores, Vol. 1 (of 3). Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-ladies-lindores-vol-1-of-3-522f3bfd-0b0b-42ab-a363-6b844a6ae543.Oliphant, M. (n.d.). The Ladies Lindores, Vol. 1 (of 3). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-ladies-lindores-vol-1-of-3-522f3bfd-0b0b-42ab-a363-6b844a6ae543Oliphant, Mrs.. The Ladies Lindores, Vol. 1 (of 3). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-ladies-lindores-vol-1-of-3-522f3bfd-0b0b-42ab-a363-6b844a6ae543.
