How long does it take to read The Bride of Lammermoor?
The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott takes about 6 hours 25 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
Book 8 of Waverley Novels
Previous: The Pirate Next: Peveril of the Peak
About 6 hours 25 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1800. 350 pages, about 96,250 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 42 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 25 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 1 minute |
The page count is the median across 75 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This new edition of The Bride of Lammermoor restores the action to 1703, before the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 rather than after it, which is where Scott's revisions of 1830 placed it. At last the sense of instability and of impermanence which permeates the novel makes sense, for what was to come in the impending revolution. Love is doomed in this the most famous of Scott's plots. Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton are destroyed not just by the opposing political and religious allegiances of their families, but by the pervasive drive for power in a state where only power guarantees the ownership of real property. Yet the politics are only an aspect of a predetermining fate, seen in the symbols of the bull, the tower, the violated maiden, the raven, in the image of the revenging ancestor, in the traditional prophecies and in the second sight of the village witches. There is only safety in Lucy's contemptus mundi, seen in her song, "Look thou not on Beauty's charming", and when she commits herself to Edgar she is lost.
Subjects: Fiction, Women murderers, Arranged marriage, History, Revenge, Swindlers and swindling
