Dariel

Dariel: a romance of Surrey is a novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1897. It is an adventure story set initially in Surrey before the action moves to the Caucasian mountains. The story is narrated by George Cranleigh, a farmer who falls in love with Dariel, the daughter of a Caucasian prince. Dariel was the last of Blackmore's novels, published just over two years before his death. PlotThe story is narrated by George Cranleigh, a younger son of Lord Harold Cranleigh, a destitute landowner in Surrey, who has been ruined, according to Blackmore, by the "farce of Free-trade."In the opening chapter George, riding home from market, surprises a maiden of surpassing beauty upon her knees in a ruined chapel. She proves to be Dariel, the daughter of Sur Imar, a prince of the Lesghians, a wild tribe of the Caucasus. A blood feud has arisen between Imar and his sister, and so he has, with his daughter, his foster-brother Stepan, and a body of retainers, come to England and settled peaceably in a deserted house in Surrey. Imar resolves to returns to his native land to educate his tribesmen in the lessons of civilisation. George, who has fallen in love with Dariel, follows her to the East. But Imar's twin-sister Marva, Queen of the Ossets, who is appropriately called by the natives "the Bride of the Devil," plans to kill Prince Imar and wed his daughter Dariel to her son. After weeks of travelling and days full of desperate adventure, George, with the help of miners and Lesghians, rescues Dariel and her father and kills the wicked Princess and her fiendish son... Richard Doddridge Blackmore (7 June 1825 - 20 January 1900), known as R. D. Blackmore, was one of the most famous English novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century. He won acclaim for vivid descriptions and personification of the countryside, sharing with Thomas Hardy a Western England background and a strong sense of regional setting in his works. Blackmore, often referred to as the "Last Victorian," was a pioneer of the movement in fiction that continued with Robert Louis Stevenson and others. He has been described as "proud, shy, reticent, strong-willed, sweet-tempered, and self-centred." Apart from his novel Lorna Doone, which has enjoyed continuing popularity, his work has gone out of print. BiographyRichard Doddridge Blackmore was born on 7 June 1825 at Longworth in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), one year after his elder brother Henry (1824-1875), where his father, John Blackmore, was Curate-in-charge of the parish. His mother died a few months after his birth - the victim of an outbreak of typhus which had occurred in the village. After this loss John Blackmore moved to Bushey, Herts, then to his native Devon, first to Kings Nympton, then Culmstock, Tor Mohun and later to Ashford, in the same county.[2] Richard, however, was taken by his aunt, Mary Frances Knight, and after her marriage to the Rev. Richard Gordon, moved with her to Elsfield rectory, near Oxford. His father married again in 1831, whereupon Richard returned to live with him. Having spent much of his childhood in the lush and pastoral "Doone Country" of Exmoor, and along the Badgworthy Water (where there is now a memorial stone in Blackmore's honour), Blackmore came to love the very countryside he immortalised in Lorna Doone.