EBOOK Old Mortality

Old Mortality (1816), which many consider the finest of Scott's Waverley novels,        is a swift-moving historical romance that places an anachronistically liberal hero        against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland, in the period        infamous as the `killing time'. Its central character, Henry Morton, joins the        rebels in order to fight Scotland's royalist oppressors, little as he shares the        Covenanters' extreme religious beliefs. He is torn between hislove for a royalist's        granddaughter and his loyalty to his downtrodden countrymen.As well as being a tale        of divided loyalties, the novel is a crucial document in the cultural history of        modern Scotland. Scott, himself a supporter of the union between Scotland and        England, was trying to exorcise the violent past of a country uncomfortably coming        to terms with its status as part of a modern United Kingdom. This novel is in itself        a significant political document, in which Scott can be seen to be attempting to        create a new centralist Scottish historiography, which is not thepolitical consensus        of his own time, the seventeenth century, or today.