Details
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Title
THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER
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Author
Hogg, James & Margot Livesey
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Binding
Paperback
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Edition
Reprint
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Condition
Used - Near Fine
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Pages
272
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Volumes
1
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Language
ENG
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Publisher
NYRB Classics, New York, New York, U.S.A.
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Date
2002
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Bookseller's Inventory #
63730
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ISBN
9781590170250 / 1590170253
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Weight
0.62 lbs (0.28 kg)
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Dimensions
8.3 x 4.79 x 0.59 in (21.08 x 12.17 x 1.50 cm)
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Themes
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Library of Congress subjects
Scotland, Psychological fiction
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Library of Congress Catalog Number
2002002884
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Dewey Decimal Code
FIC
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Summary
One of the supreme masterpieces of Romantic fiction and Scottish literature, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a terrifying tale of murder and amorality, and of one man's descent into madness and despair. James Hogg's sardonic novel follows a young man who, falling under the spell of a mysterious stranger who bears an uncanny likeness to himself, embarks on a career as a serial murderer. The memoirs are presented by a narrator whose attempts to explain the story only succeed in intensifying its more baffling and bizarre aspects. Is the young man the victim of a psychotic delusion, or has he been tempted by the devil to wage war against God's enemies? The authoritative and lively introduction by Ian Duncan covers the full range of historical and religious themes and contexts, offers a richer and more accurate consideration of the novel's relation to Romantic fiction than found elsewhere, and sheds new light on the novel's treatment of fanaticism. Copious notes identify the novel's historical, biblical, theological, and literary allusions. - Publisher.
From the publisher
James Hogg (1770-1835) was born in the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish Borders. When he was seven, his father, a sheep farmer, went bankrupt and Hogg left school hardly able to read; he could only shape letters “nearly an inch in length,” he wrote later in his autobiography. For many years, he worked as a cowherd and later as a shepherd. His mother, however, steeped him in ballads and folklore, and his grandfather was apparently the last man to talk with the fairies. Only in his twenties, when Hogg was exposed to books once more, did he begin to write, his first creations being “songs and ballads made up for the lassies to sing in chorus.” At forty, he set out for Edinburgh and, after starting the short-lived satirical magazine The Spy, he wrote poems and stories for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, first published in 1824, has long been considered his masterpiece.
Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and now lives in the US. She is the author of a collection of stories and four novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, and Eva Moves the Furniture.
Media reviews
James Hogg’s great novel is set in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, a city of night and shadow, of lurking eavesdroppers and invisible pursuers, of gloomy wynds and crepuscular crannies. The novel splits and doubles itself, its themes, and its characters: two texts, one following the other, are written from two different points of view; narrating the same terrible story, they contradict each other here and there, forming an asymmetrical diptych, all the more compelling for its discordancy and conflicts.
— Marina Warner
A work so moving, so funny, so impassioned, so exact and so mysterious, that its emergence from a long history of neglect came as a surprise which has yet to lose its resonance.
— Karl Miller, The Times Literary Supplement
Neglected at first, this brilliant short novel has climbed in the esteem of readers until it is now regarded as one of the glories of English literature—or, for those who like to subdivide these matters, of Scottish literature.
— John Wain
About the author
James Hogg (1770-1835) was born in the Ettrick Valley in the Scottish Borders. When he was seven, his father, a sheep farmer, went bankrupt and Hogg left school hardly able to read; he could only shape letters "nearly an inch in length," he wrote later in his autobiography. For many years, he worked as a cowherd and later as a shepherd. His mother, however, steeped him in ballads and folklore, and his grandfather was apparently the last man to talk with the fairies. Only in his twenties, when Hogg was exposed to books once more, did he begin to write, his first creations being "songs and ballads made up for the lassies to sing in chorus." At forty, he set out for Edinburgh and, after starting the short-lived satirical magazine
The Spy, he wrote poems and stories for Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, first published in 1824, has long been considered his masterpiece.
Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands and now lives in the US. She is the author of a collection of stories and four novels:
Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, and
Eva Moves the Furniture.
