Recommendations
Books Like The Heart of Midlothian
Best books to read after The Heart of Midlothian by Walter Scott
Readers who love The Heart of Midlothian — Scott's masterpiece of Jeanie Deans walking to London to plead for her sister's life rather than lie in court — will enjoy these works of Scottish literature, the literature of moral integrity, and the great tradition of the heroic ordinary person in fiction.
- 1Buy
Waverley
by Walter Scott
The founding Scott novel — read first to understand his historical method; The Heart of Midlothian is what he achieved when he applied that method to his most fully realized heroine.
- 2Buy
Old Mortality
by Walter Scott
The companion Covenanting novel — the tradition that shaped Jeanie Deans is the same tradition Scott depicts in Old Mortality's religious civil war; reading the two together gives the fullest picture of Scott's engagement with Scottish Calvinism.
- 3Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The Victorian novel that most fully inherits the concerns of The Heart of Midlothian — Dorothea Brooke's desire for heroic action and her eventual acceptance of domestic life echo Jeanie's heroism; both novels argue for the epic possibilities of ordinary life.
- 4Buy
Adam Bede
by George Eliot
Eliot's first novel is the most direct heir to The Heart of Midlothian — Adam Bede's situation (a young woman condemned for infanticide, a man who loves her and cannot save her) directly echoes Effie's situation and Jeanie's response; Eliot knew and learned from Scott.
- 5Buy
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
by James Hogg
Hogg's Gothic masterpiece is the dark underside of the Covenanting tradition that shapes Jeanie Deans — reading the two together shows the full range of what Scottish Calvinist culture produced in fiction.
- 6Buy
Germinal
by Émile Zola
Zola's novel of the mining community's strike shares The Heart of Midlothian's concern with the epic dimensions of ordinary working-class life — both novels find heroism in communities that conventional literature treats as beneath heroism.
- 7Buy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's tragic heroine is the Victorian descendant of Effie Deans — the young woman destroyed by sexuality, social judgment, and the gap between her worth and her fate; Tess inherits Effie's situation without Jeanie to save her.
- 8Buy
Sunset Song
by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
The twentieth-century heir to The Heart of Midlothian in Scottish fiction — Chris Guthrie's experience of the Great War's destruction of her farming world in the Mearns is Scott's concern with historical loss applied to the early twentieth century, with an equally powerful central heroine.
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