By SUZANNE KING
YOU’VE been enchanted by Poldark on the small screen; now go beyond the BBC’s televised adaptation and discover Winston Graham’s 18th century Cornwall in the novel that started it all, the newly released edition of Ross Poldark.
Earlier this year, BBC and Mammoth Screen presented a new television series based on the first two “Poldark” novels by Winston Graham, OBE. The 12 novels are set in South-West Cornwall, telling the story of the last few generations of miners before the mines were played out and the Cornish began to seek overseas opportunities for their skills.
Graham’s characters and storylines retain such a degree of freshness that the books have never been out of print.
The main story is of Ross Poldark, who returns to Cornwall after serving as a British officer in the American Revolutionary War. His sudden return touches the lives and futures of all who know him: his cousin Verity, a young woman predestined to a life of familial servitude; his former sweetheart Elizabeth who believed him dead and agreed to marry another and his tenant miners who are barely surviving on mining wages.
Ross’s own world unexpectedly transforms when he encounters a young tomboy Demelza, who is fleeing her home for a temporary break from a life of oppressed poverty. Fresh from exposure to reforms in the “New World”, Ross begins to question the social structures of class and privilege that both enforce and restrict his world.
From his position of landed gentry, he moves easily between the worlds of privilege and of poverty, and becomes the catalyst for change that his class cannot, or will not endorse. Enter George Warleggan, an ambitious acquaintance who strives to rise beyond his merchant-class parentage into the world of finance, and effectively squash Ross’s fledgling attempts to restore prosperity to the region.
