Lorna Doone
R.D. Blackmore
Big guy and small girl
I'm not quite sure when I read Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. I think it was during my undergrad years -- probably it was missing from the libraries I had easy access to as a High School student. It is, of course, one of the romance classics. According to Wikipedia, it has never been out of print since 1870. It's in the public domain, so you can get it for free, for instance from Amazon or Project Gutenberg.
As the subtitle indicates, Lorna Doone takes place mostly in and around Exmoor, a rugged region of Western England (now a national park). If, like me, you associate the name "Lorna Doone" with Scotland (perhaps because of the cookies), you're not wrong. The Doones are a family of outlaws who fled Scotland to hole up in Exmoor, whence they terrorize the surrounding English citizens. How much of this is historically accurate I don't know. R.D. Blackmore is careful not to claim that Lorna Doone is a historical novel, so probably not much.
The first-person narrator is a young man, a 17th-century farmer, John Ridd, whose father was murdered by the Doones. John reminds me of the words of Jim Croce's song "You don't mess around with Jim"
Yeah, he big and dumb as a man can come
It transpires that John is not really stupid -- he is one of those wise people who is confident enough in himself not to be bothered by the opinions of other people, and indeed to derive advantage from being underestimated. The Doone men are famous for being huge, the better to terrorize the farmers, but John is even bigger than they.
John and Lorna meet cute and John falls in love. Lorna is a very beautiful woman. (Remember, of course, that we are seeing her through John's eyes.) She is petite. If you're wondering about the genetics of a family that produces huge men and a petite daughter, well, yeah, you're onto something. John rescues Lorna from a danger I will not reveal and she falls in love with him, too.
This is followed by all the sorts of plot complications you might expect of a popular romance of this time period. I will not spoil the plot further, except to say that it's action-packed and not particularly plausible. But it's lots of fun, and if you like romance novels, there's a good chance that you will enjoy this one. After all, this is a book that has never been out of print since 1870!