Customer Reviews

Love for Lydia

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HE Bates is one of the most under-rated authors of the Century and this book is his masterpiece. It is the story of the love of a young man for the beautiful Lydia, and how their love has painful and tragic consequences for them both and their friends. It is a story of warmth, love lost and love found, of growing up, of rejection and hope. HE Bates had a profound love for the countryside and it shines through in the detail of his narrative. A few books teach you more and more each time you read them: this is one of them.

This book has one of the most accurate descriptions of wintertime that I have ever read. It's a beautiful book that should not be read quickly-- one should savor it rather, because every sentence is so elegantly crafted that you practically want to memorize it. It's one of the few books I always have with me.

Love for Lydia is set in the small-town English countryside. It's exactly as where the author, H. E. Bates lived. Bates was a prolific (100+) author and this is one of his best received tales. Others include, "The Darling Buds of May" and "My Uncle Silas". To emphasize the importance of these three books; all were made into television series and are available on DVD yet today.

TRUTH ABOUT LOVE FOR LYDIA:
The book is about a teenage girl coming of age and learning of love.

It is not a SEX, SEX, SEX book.

The book follows the life of fictional Richardson (the "I" in the story) and his own search for what love is or means.

The book is not pornographic, unless you consider the one-time mention of dancing in a brassier, or the noticing a breast in the hospital, or the intimations of having made love without spelling out the act. This story is of looking for love, not acting it out.

Truth is, there is abundant kissing. STEAMY?

Alex, Blackie, Tom, as well as Richardson fall in love with Lydia--who can help it?, she's beautiful, fun, and charming. But she started out shy and withdrawn. Skating and dancing breaks down the shyness and life becomes a whirlwind of joyous activity--to excess--even to a life-threatening binge. Loves die and others grow. Who will win Lydia's love, once she discovers what it is for herself? That's what makes the book worth the read. That's what made it into a television series.

The revealing of love's journey in this story is what makes it a reprint decades after the author's 1974 death. The story is timeless, and the location seems sometimes to be describing an American location, instead of the true English scene.

Don't buy this if you are looking for a cheap, hot, romance novel. This is a classic romance. Bates takes young love and passes it through years of exposure. As Lydia asked herself, "Will you love me, even if I'm bad to you?"

OK, so I'm a guy. Ladies, you'll love this book for some of your own reasons, like fantastic descriptions of clothing and settings. Flirtatious dialogue. Romantic male actions (flowers and such). It's so honest and true-to-life, perhaps that's what makes it a can't-put-it-down book.

Love depicted between Lydia and her male associates is nearly as PG-rated as that found involving Mr. Aartemann, in "Mr. Aartemann's Crayon."

Lydia is a symbol of the Twenties -- a time when young women were learning to be more direct and uninhibited by morality. As a rather shy girl who inherits a great deal of money at a young age, Lydia is surrounded by young men anxious to please. But instead of settling on just one, Lydia soon finds that she can enjoy two or three young men buzzing around her as long as she likes. She plays them against each other and allows each one to think that only he has won her heart. But all the while, her own lifestyle is growing ever more reckless and self destructive.

The sex scenes in this book are very steamy. Deep down Lydia is the type of girl who really just can't get enough. But she's also very good at pretending to be cold and haughty when dealing with her gentleman friends. When dealing with the well to do lads who offer marriage, she can be quite stiff, yet the secret flings she has with local working lads are very sexy and raw.

The narrator of this book is honest and true. He is the only young man in the village who sees Lydia for what she is. The sad thing is, he can't help loving her. But finally he walks away. When that happens, Lydia becomes truly heartbroken. There are more parties, and more wild affairs, and of course there is more drinking. Lydia smokes and drinks and is the very picture of the glamorous young, always having fun and being quite scandalous.

Yet all the time, there is a hollowness in her life she can't understand. The last chapters of the book show Lydia really reaching a decision to reach out honestly to the man she loves. Of course you don't see that right away. At first she just feels blue without knowing why. It's so touching the way she has one jazz record that reminds her of that honest young love, and she plays that record only when alone in her room. You see her lying around after a late night, resting in her room and listening to the music, and thinking. Is this all she wants from life? Gradually she drops off to sleep on the bed, and the faces of all the young men she's kissed come back to her. But when she falls asleep she pictures herself with that special young man, not dancing to hot jazz or making out in a car, but the time he taught her how to ice skate on the frozen river.

Lydia knows what she has to do. But does she succeed? LOVE FOR LYDIA is a sexy book with some really romantic moments.

This book is so exquisite. I've never read a book where the landscape and seasons were so vital. Bates' descriptions are poetic and beautiful. For this reason this is one of my top 10 favorite novels of all time. It transports the reader to rural England in the 1920s.

To celebrate my 150th review for this site, I thought I would turn to another of my favourite books. Like a number of British authors writing in the early twentieth century, H. E. Bates was greatly influenced by the work of Thomas Hardy. He shared with Hardy not only a deep love of nature and of the English countryside, but also a talent for vivid verbal descriptions of that countryside. There are also thematic links between the two writers. Bates's "The Feast of July" has a similar plot to that of Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", and "Love for Lydia" makes employs two plot devices much used by Hardy, love between people of different social classes and two or more men in love with the same woman.

All of Hardy's novels are set in the South-West of England (or "Wessex" as he called it), especially his native Dorset. Bates too concentrated on certain regions of the country as the setting for his novels, typically Northamptonshire, the county where he grew up, and Kent, the country to which he moved in the 1930s. (Some of his wartime stories, such as "The Jacaranda Tree" and "Fair Stood the Wind for France" are set abroad).

Like "The Feast of July" and "Charlotte's Row", "Love for Lydia", first published in 1952, is one of his Northamptonshire novels, set in the small industrial town of Evensford, possibly based upon his home town of Rushden, a town where the main industry is the manufacture of shoes and leather goods. The story takes place during the late 1920s and early 1930s and is narrated by the main character, Mr Richardson, a young apprentice journalist on the local newspaper. (We never learn his Christian name). The novel may be semi-autobiographical; Richardson is around the same age as the author would have been and, like him, works both as a reporter and as a warehouse clerk.

The title character is Lydia Aspen, a girl from a once-wealthy but now impoverished aristocratic family who, after the death of her father, moves to Evensford to live with her elderly aunts and her eccentric uncle. Richardson first meets her when he is sent to their house (a crumbling mansion isolated from the rest of the town behind a high stone wall) to get a story about her father's death. Lydia, a seemingly shy girl, has led a sheltered existence, and her meeting with Richardson allows him to introduce her to the pleasures of ordinary life; for instance, he takes her skating on the frozen rivers, a popular local pastime during cold winters.

Lydia and Richardson fall in love, but he realises that he is not her only admirer. She has at least three others- Alex Sanderson, the son of a local businessman, Tom Holland, a young farmer, and Bert "Blackie" Johnson, a car mechanic. Richardson realises that Lydia is not the shy, innocent girl for which he initially took her but can be wilful and fun-loving, and that she greatly enjoys the attentions of so many young men. His position is made more difficult by the fact that Alex and Tom are both close friends of his, and of each other. The Hardy novel with which "Love for Lydia" has the closest affinity is perhaps "Far from the Madding Crowd" with which it shares a serene ending following earlier tragedy. The impetuous Lydia has something in common with Bathsheba Everdene, and Tom recalls Gabriel Oak in his temperament as well as his profession.

"Love for Lydia" is one of Bates's best novels. As I mentioned earlier, the author had a great talent for conveying the beauty of nature in words, and that talent is much in evidence here in his descriptions of rural scenes at all seasons of the year. Northamptonshire (and, indeed, the East Midlands in general) is not normally regarded as the most spectacular area of England, but Bates here shows that even relatively unspectacular landscapes can have a beauty of their own. Similar descriptive powers can be found in Bates's other writings, but this book also demonstrates qualities which are sometimes lacking in some of his other works.

In some of his earlier novels, Bates's handling of his plots is not always satisfactory; an example is "Charlotte's Row" which, although it has some interesting themes, is let down by a weak ending, involving a clumsy shift of emphasis away from the main characters. "Love for Lydia", by contrast, is much more focused on its main storyline, that of Richardson and Lydia, and brings it to a satisfying resolution. The use of the first-person mode of narration adds a greater emotional power and immediacy to the work. Bates is able to make us empathise deeply with his hero as he experiences both the joys and the sorrows of young love and of friendship, as well as the pain of the tragedies which affect him and those close to him. This is one of the finest love-stories in twentieth-century English literature.

Donna Lewis' song I love You Always Forever was inspired by this book. It is the best song!!!! The book is very good....I just want to say you should read this!!!!!1