R. D. Blackmore

Richard Doddridge Blackmore was born on 7 June 1825 at Longworth in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), where his father, John Blackmore, was curate. His mother died of typhus a few months later, and he was taken in by an aunt until his father remarried in 1831. His father had moved to his native Devon, and Blackmore spent much of his childhood in the Exmoor countryside he would later write about in Lorna Doone.

He went to Blundell's School in Tiverton and won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, and during a university vacation he began his first novel, The Maid of Sker, which was not published until 1872. He was called to the Bar in 1852, but ill health kept him from working full time as a lawyer, and in 1854 he became a classics master at a school in Twickenham. In 1857 money left to him by an uncle let him buy land at Teddington, where he built a house and ran a market garden growing fruit.

Blackmore published poetry before turning to novels. His third novel, Lorna Doone (1869), the book on this site, first appeared in three volumes without success; its great popularity came with a one-volume edition, which put him in the front rank of British novelists of the time. He was praised for his vivid descriptions of the countryside.

He died at Teddington on 20 January 1900, aged 74. Apart from Lorna Doone, which has stayed popular, his books have gone out of print.

Sources: wikipedia.org