Blackmore, Richard Doddridge

1825–1900, English novelist. Although trained as a lawyer and called to the bar, he abandoned his legal career because of ill health. His reputation rests chiefly on his romantic novel about the 17th-century outlaws of Exmoor, Lorna Doone (1869), but he wrote also 13 other novels—including The Maid of Sker (1872) and Springhaven (1887)—and several volumes of poetry.

See biography by W. H. Dunn (1956, repr. 1974); study by K. G. Budd (1960).