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.