The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
A pious young man is raised to believe that he is one of the elect, and therefore cannot sin, whatever he does. Hogg tells the story twice: first as a respectable editor's account, then as the sinner's own memoir, and the two versions contradict each other in ways that matter.
It is a Gothic novel about theology rather than castles, and the doppelgänger who may or may not exist makes it one of the strangest books of the period. Hogg was a shepherd and self-taught writer, and his Edinburgh is small, gossipy and cruel. Read it alongside James Hogg's own reputation, which took a century to recover.
Public-domain status
First published in 1824. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; James Hogg died in 1835, so this work has been free to republish there since 1906.
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