Love for Lydia

I read this as a teenager and totally fell in love with the story so it's wonderful to find this back in print with a new cover.

Set just after the first world war, Lydia moves to a country town to live with her aunts and uncle, and plays havoc with the emotions of all the young men who see her. 

It's all here: first love, unrequited love, jealousy, passion and despair - but H.E. Bates is a restrained and sublime writer so this never descends into over-blown melodrama. 

A gorgeous, glorious love story - highly recommended.

Another lovely story set in the 50's.
Lydia moves into Evensford village and also into young men's hearts!
H. E. Bates can do no wrong when writing about the times when life was much  slower and innocent.

Lydia arrived an awkward girl, bloomed into an attractive woman, discovered men liked her, and gaily left a wake of bodies in her path. When she saw what she had accomplished she tried to burn herself out in a two year binge of dancing and drink and ended up desperately lonely and guilty in a sanitarium. 

Some might believe Lydia was a tease and vixen, partying her way into destruction. Others may feel she was a girl-child who, when released from the 'cotton-wool'  prison of her girlhood, mishandles her sudden sexual power over men. Or is she the genetic product of her profligate parents, an alcoholic mother paid off to keep away and the distant, womanizing father who proscribed her sheltered girlhood? 

Love for Lydia by H.E. Bates is an autobiographical homage to his home town, with the narrator Richardson sharing Bates' early jobs and family. 

It is the story of young people growing up, the thrill and torment of first love, the end of a way of life, and class stricture. It is the story of what happens when four young men fall for Lydia and how she handles their adulation. It is the story of learning what love really means. It is a love story to England's pastoral beauty.

A cuckoo flew with bubbling throaty calls across the wheat-field, disappearing beyond the copses. In the still air I caught again a great breath of grass and hawthorn and bluebell and earth beating through new pulses of spring loveliness to the very edge of summer.
The novel begins in 1929 when Richardson is nineteen and a reporter for the town paper. Richardson is sent to the Aspen manor to learn about the eldest Aspen brother's demise. The deceased's elderly spinster sisters introduce Richardson to his heir and daughter, Lydia. The aunts suggest he take her skating, show her some fun, for they don't want her growing up in isolation. Ill dressed and stick thin with candlestick curls, Lydia is having fun with peers for the first time. It is a magical time.
Above the trees a mass of winter stars, glittering with crystal flashes of vivid green, then white, then ice-clear blue, flashed down through a wide and wonderful silence that seemed to splinter every now and then with a crack of frost-taut boughs in the copses, down where the drive went, above the frozen stream.

Richardson discovers that Lydia is game for anything, pushing him past his comfort zone. And into regular clandestine meetings where she enjoys his physical attention. As Lydia fills out her aunt's hand-me-down dresses Richardson falls in love, and Lydia claims to love him too.

'Oh! Darling--don't stop loving me'--she said. 'Don't ever stop loving me-'...'Even if I'm bad to you--would you?--will you always?'
'Yes,' I said.

The aunts press the young people to attend dances and Lydia's social network expands. Richardson's best friend, Alex, local yeoman's son Tom, and chauffeur Blackie all fall under Lydia's charm and vie for her love. Lydia is 'excitable and impulsive," following her instincts thoughtlessly.  In the battle for Lydia's attention hearts are broken and even a death occurs.

The descriptions of the landscape are beautifully written. Richardson seeks out nature as a respite and for its restorative effects. The town is a center of shoe manufacturing, an unattractive and crowded place. Richardson is very aware that the loveliness of the land has been infringed upon by mankind. 

In 1977 I watched and enjoyed the Masterpiece Theater's series Love for Lydia but had not read the book until now. I am so glad I did. I will look to read more by Mr. Bates in the future.

Anyone interested in the English Language must read Mr. Bates, one of its outstanding masters. Times Literary Supplement.

Learn more about H. E. Bates at http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/he-bates/
http://hebatescompanion.com http://www.thevanishedworld.co.uk/index.html See a clip of the series Love for Lydia at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EV2MkbRI4I

Good news! Next month Bloomsbury are reissuing novels and many short stories by H E Bates as e-books. I’ve already read Love for Lydia, courtesy of NetGalley. This is a five star book for me, mainly because of the writing. When I say that Bates was a great storyteller in the old-fashioned way, it’s a compliment.

I’d not read Love for Lydia before. I heard it read on Radio 4 years ago and wanted to read it then but it was hard to find a copy. It was first published in 1952 and is set (like The Feast of July), in the Northamptonshire of Bates’ own youth, in a grim town which shoe making and leather tanning have made dirty and smelly. At a distance from the town is the big house where the Aspens live, marooned in their own island of gardens and privilege. The hero narrator, ‘Mr Richardson’, hates the town, which is why he spends so much time walking in the local countryside. The English landscape is lyrically described; its changing seasons, its flowers and wildlife, its transience. It’s against this background that the story of young love, passion and tragedy is played out.

When her father dies, Lydia Aspen comes to live with her aunts and uncle. The aunts worry that she will be lonely and encourage Richardson to take her out. At first Lydia seems very young and awkward but she already has a strange attraction for men. Once she realises this, she exploits her power. She seem wilful, cruel sometimes, impossible to understand. Everything that happens, happens because of her. Richardson is looking back at the events; not nostalgically exactly, because some of the results are terrible, but in an elegiac way, regretting the lost world of the Aspen house and the countryside, already threatened in his youth, now further despoiled. There are echoes here of Great Expectations (Richardson is Lydia’s social inferior), Brideshead Revisited, even Le Grand Meaulnes. Lydia is Estella with an unexpected heart.

This is a fine novel, beautifully written. It could almost have been called Love for England. I hope Bates will find a new readership thanks to the reissues.

When Lydia Aspen is sent into the care of her reclusive aunts in the “big house” in rural Evensford, they are concerned to ensure that she isn’t isolated from other young people and ask a local newspaper reporter to look after  her and take her out and about. This he does with pleasure, but looking after Lydia turns out to be a far more complicated business than anyone could have imagined. This is a really charming and engaging tale, beautifully written, very evocative of its time and place, and a touching love story. Set just after WWI, young people are challenging the established order and the boundaries between the social classes are gradually being eroded. Although Bates has an observant and sometimes acerbic eye for the social nuances, he’s never cruel and always shows empathy and understanding for his characters with their foibles and inadequacies. There’s tragedy here, but also gentleness and generosity, and all in all it’s a delightful book, one which has stood well the test of time.

What a wonderful book!  I first read this novel many years ago and was charmed by the delicate plot of two young people growing up in the Midlands after the First World War with differing ideas of class, aspiration and society.  I was so pleased to have another opportunity with this book, as I found so much more in the writing on my second reading.  Bates conjures up a wonderful landscape of vivid countryside and detailed urban life, contrasting the varied circumstances of the characters with their backgrounds and setting.  The beautiful writing lyrically describes the changing seasons and the growing maturity of the small community, and subtly explores the fluctuations of emotion and understanding within a few short years of the characters' early life.  I loved it and look forward to being reacquainted with some of H.E.Bates' other novels in the near future.

I would never have discovered H. E. Bates if not for TV.  What American woman is not glued on Sunday night to “Masterpiece Theater,” a show devoted to British costume drama?  I discovered "Love in a Cold Climate," "Poldark," "The Forsyte Saga," "The Jewel in the Crown, "and many other classics through these dramatizations.

My favorite novel discovered through “Masterpiece” is H. E. Bates’ "Love for Lydia."  Filmed in 1977 and shown in the U.S. in 1981, it is based on Bates’s 1952 masterpiece, which, according to the introduction in the new Bloomsbury Reader e-book edition (released next month), is the most autobiographical of his Northamptonshire novels. The film is stunning, but Bates’s novel is truly an underrated classic.  Set in Evensford, a town of leather factories, it is the story of a love triangle (or quadrangle, depending on whether or not you include Blackie, the auto mechanic), which revolves aroung Lydia, a beautiful, strong-willed young woman who comes to Evensford live with her aunts and uncle after the death of her father.

The narrator, Richardson,  is a brooding, underemployed reporter for The County Examiner who hates his job.  He meets Lydia when he is sent to the Aspen house to interview the aristocratic family about the death of her father.  He is apprehensive about visiting the house, which is separated from the town by a stone wall and a perimeter of trees, and even more apprehensive about asking questions. “It was possible to live in Evensford for a long time, even for a generation, and not see the Aspen house, the Aspen garden or the Aspens themselves.”

But one of the aunts, Miss Juliana Aspen, is impressed with him and asks him to take Lydia skating.  She does not want Lydia to be cut off from the town, as she and her sister were:  she wants Lydia to be a modern girl of the 1920s.

There is something Thomas Hardyish about this novel: Lydia reminds me slightly of Bathsheba Everdene in "Far from the Madding Crowd." (Everdene sounds very much like Evensford, doesn’t it?)  Like Bathsheba, Lydia is an independent well-to-do woman with a siren-like effect on men. But this is not Lydia’s fault:  she is a vivacious woman who wants to experiment sexually after a life of isolation on her father’s estate.  And this leads to tragedy, but Bates does not blame her.  It is as much Richardson’s fault as hers.

The skating brings Lydia to sexual maturity.  She is shy and awkward, then learns to skate after many falls and gains confidence.  Richardson is a good teacher, but his friend, Tom Holland, a farmer, suggests he let her go, that you have to go on your own to learn.

And suddenly she gets it!

    "…But all at once she began skating. She went forward in a flash of release, suddenly, as everyone does, all alone, clear and confident at last and free.

   " Like this, tentative but balanced and feeling her way, she skated for about twenty yards. And then, in a freer, wider swing of her arms, she lost her balance, but she regained it, bringing her feet together so that she could glide. In this moment I heard her laughing. The impetus of her strokes had taken her rather fast from thin unbrushed snow into ice that had been swept clear. She was going too fast to stop. Then I saw Tom Holland laughing too, holding up his large hands, ready to stop her. In another moment he was holding her by the red sweater and she was laughing on his shoulder.

    ‘Wonderful! It’s wonderful!’ she screamed. ‘I can do it! I can stand!’

Bloomsbury Reader is reissuing all of Bates’s work.  The new edition of Love for Lydia will be released in May.

An incredible book, absolutely marvelous

I haven't read H E Bates for years, what have I been missing? This book was delightful and charming. I loved the descriptions of the countryside. I found the characters believable and the angst of feelings was almost palpable. Highly recommended and I Will certainly be revisiting this author

Read this when I was much younger.  Loved it then and still do.  H.E. Bates is one of my favourite English authors.

Loved the story! Loved the characters! Liked the story flow. Sometimes intense but good read. Makes you wonder sometimes about people. Great read! Given copy for honest review.

This book is to be read slowly so as to savor the picturesque wording and revel in the love of a young man for a young woman and the sadness that occurs when that young woman recklessly lives her life and destroys her one true happiness

I read and fell in love with this novel as a teenager. And I am so glad it is being re-released now! This is a lovely, lyrical book - a coming of age set in the (viscerally depicted) English countryside. The eponymous (anti) heroine is beautiful, terrible, enviable, pitiable - and obviously utterly compelling. I ached for the young narrator as he navigated his way into adulthood, enduring in that process all the hope, pain and humiliation that she could chuck at him. And, by the end of the novel, of course, I ached for Lydia too. A wonderful, warm and still accessible classic.

Love for Lydia is a story narrator, by Mr. Richardson who is one of Lydia’s love interests.  Lydia Aspen arrives in Evensford an insecure young girl and develops into a seductive young woman where the men in her life adore her.  She starts to realize the effect she has on certain men and uses it to her advantage.  In the end all she wants is to be loved and life can be cruel at times with the hand it deals.  Mr. Richardson tells you how she affected his life and those around her.

The always vanishing world, remembered

Curiously, I have never read any H.E.Bates, though somehow I believed I had – a misrembered conflation with another author going by initials – L.P. Hartley, he of The Go-Between. So when NetGalley offered me Love For Lydia, I took it, and was swept away and absorbed from the off. I shall certainly be pursuing an acquaintance with more of Bates, based on this between the wars set novel, beautifully exploring a Northamptonshire set rural/small town world, the fictional Evensford,  as the giddy twenties turns towards the great recession, Hunger Marches, and, later, war. Demarcations of class are beginning to break-down, though these are certainly still firmly in place at the start of the novel.

The central character and narrator, Richardson – his first name is never revealed,  is looking back on his youth. He was a young, callow, bookish man, both aspirational and dreamy, in his very late teens/verge of his twenties. He had a couple of firm friendships from his schooldays. Tom Holland, a young farmer, symbolising a thoroughly decent, uncomplicated kind of Anglo-Saxon English yeoman, whose warm, large family have had their roots in the countryside, with a keen sense of home, for generations. His other friend, Alex Sanderson, no less innocent, is more highly strung. It is less clear, with both Richardson himself, and Alex, what their eventual place in the world will be. At the start of the novel, Richardson is working, not very successfully, not very willingly, as a reporter on the local paper, a job he throws up for a less demanding, more casual place as a clerk in one of the local leather industries. There is hint that more ‘bookish’ concerns will draw him – and his work background has similarities to Bates’ own. Alex is from a financially comfortable background, his father a businessman. The three friends are comfortable middle class, and certainly there is no real hint of poverty, struggle or want here. Peculiarly, the idea of less security is suggested by both the class above and below. Blackie Johnson is the son of one of the local garage car (or as it was, now changing rapidly) coach repairers and ‘cabs’ Blackie’s father is still respectful and subservient to those of higher status; Blackie himself holds no truck with forelock tugging.

Shaking up this more-or-less settled state of affairs comes Lydia Aspen. She is the niece (and eventual heir) of one of the district’s ‘aristocratic’ families – at least in status, though not in title, the Aspens. A distinct sense of having come down financially in the world adheres to the family, and Lydia’s origins are a little vague, some hintings that her father may have made a ‘marriage beneath’. Lydia is out of class for everyone, but, because class itself is changing, and there are few young people of her own class, geographically close, Richardson, and later his friends, will be the ones to show Lydia Evensford society. Lydia is magnetic, warm, voluptuous, fickle and in love with both her own strong, excited desire to embrace ‘life’ and in the love and devotion she lures out of all who come under her spell. She will both wreak havoc, change, and both destroy the stability of all of the young men, whilst also providing an awakening into the glories of first love and the pain of first loss.

There is a wonderful story here. It has a kind of mythic, operatic Greek tragedy to it, but bound to an English restraint, a sense of things not spelt out, but inherent. Bates’ prose, particularly in description of the natural world, the land, the changing seasons is lyrical and strong – I was reminded of Laurie Lee, that same sense of writing about landscape from someone who had learned a relationship with it primarily through living with it and working it, not from reading about it. Bates is as observant and surprising in all his descriptions though, whether these are of hedgerows, landscapes through seasons, or the physical quirks and particularities of character. That sense of an English mythic, the relationship with land beginning to change, through the incursion of ‘modern’, and through ancient and formalised structures (like class) shifting, sometimes quite painfully, also reminded me of a writer a couple of generations earlier – Hardy, though Bates is, I think, more accessible, punchier, of course ‘modern’. Bates’ writing has a very satisfying tension between feverish page-turning, a desire to know ‘what happens next’ and an equally strong ‘whoa, slow down, savour each moment’ quality, because he is so very adept at describing the texture of being in each moment : his writing is kinaesthetic. And that tension mirrors beautifully what the narrator experiences – the desire to hold on to moments, whilst the sense of life inexorably driving onwards is happening – not to mention the fact that we (and he) know that past has gone, even though it might seem tantalisingly close, because Richardson is recounting all this, looking back from the knowledge of everything that has happened. He is writing from memory, and memory shapes the events of the past into patterns; patterns not seen whilst living within them

This is another of those books I'm not quite sure of my opinion. I'm not even sure if I understood it, it was one of those books that anyone can understand, they just have to care to do so. In truth, I didn't care to do so, if anything, I'm quite surprised that I persisted in reading it.

My somewhat poor opinion of it is not because of the writing- which was actually brilliantly old fashioned and very descriptive (though a little long-winded at times). I was troubled by the characters, the two older Aspen sisters,  the drunkard Alex and the homely sensible Nancy were the only endearing features of the book. 

Lydia, the leading character, was an impetuous, silly 'brat' of a woman: forcing those around her to obey her every command. Why they did is beyond me. Her words (something along the lines of) "'You will call me won't you. Do call me. I shall hate you if you don't. And I shall never speak to you again!" 

I simply couldn't tolerate her, and now she has me speaking just as she would, were she writing this.  Did English women in the 1920s actually speak this way? She just seemed so selfish, and unbearably childish. I don't know, I really don't.  

The story, itself, escalated quite slowly- a tale of a young woman (Lydia) and her acquaintance with a young man (Mr. Richardson). During their time together, love blooms. She was a woman who had been kept from the world, hidden, and he- a man wanting her only for himself. She tires of him, quickly, and entertains his male companions; and leads them on. All the time, she actually has no knowledge of her 'feelings', though she never admits this- and only insults the ever so clever Mr. Robertson with the words. Really, why they 'loved' her is beyond me.

HE Bates wrote before, during, and after World War II. Many readers came to his work after seeing a televised version of it on Masterpiece Theater. It was different for me. I am fond of excellent fiction, military history, and short stories, and when I cruised Net Galley and found The Flying Officer X and Other Stories, I took a chance and scored a copy. Once I had read those, I knew I would want to read more of his work when I could. So although I came to this outstanding novel in a different way than most readers, I have to tell you that I loved it every bit as much as they did. Thank you Net Galley and Bloomsbury Reader for the complimentary DRC.  I read multiple books at a time, and I feel a bit sorry for others I read at the same time I read this, because almost everything else looks shabby next to Bates’s work. Those that enjoy great literary fiction, romance, and historical fiction—which this technically isn’t, since it was written during that time rather than later, but the feeling it generates is similar—should get a copy. Once the reader opens it, she is destined to be lost to all other purposes until the last page is turned.

This spellbinding story will be released digitally Thursday, May 12, 2016.

The setting is a small town in Britain, a town with a tannery and small farms. One great house surrounded by beautiful gardens stands aloof from the rest; it houses two elderly single women and their alcoholic brother.

Then Lydia, their niece, comes to live with them.

Lydia’s arrival is cloaked in mystery. She doesn’t talk about her mother. The aunts encourage the belief that Lydia is an orphan, but we later learn that isn’t really true. And at first Lydia, who has been cocooned so carefully that she has no social graces nor any real wardrobe, futzing around in clothing that looks suspiciously like that of her elderly aunts, really needs a trustworthy young mentor close to her own age. After having eyed the local population, the aunts send for the protagonist, young Mr. Richards, whose family fortunes have slid to terrible places. Once the proud owners of considerable farmland, the Richards family is now cramped in a noisy flat that shares a wall—and the attendant noises and smells—with the tannery.

 Perhaps the thing the aunts like most about young Richards is his great fondness for flowers, an unusual trait in a young man at the party-animal age. He endears himself to the aunt that gives her attention to the landscaping, commenting on the traits of flowers and making suggestions that create an instant bond between young man and old lady, but Richards is unprepared for what awaits him.

The aunts want him to meet Lydia, and they wonder whether he might take her skating on the lake. He agrees to do so. Lydia has never skated and starts out as if she were a colt trying to navigate a frozen surface, all arms and legs floundering, falling. So he is unprepared for the grace and dignity that soon possess her. They fall in love, and young love proves to be the school of hard knocks for our young man, as it is for so many.

None of this brief outline can provide Bates’s magical facility with words. This blog has reviewed hundreds of books—all read and reviewed by me—and this is one that stands out and that has stood the test of time. Bates transports us to a place we have never been and makes us feel we know it, and its inhabitants, intimately. He also lights on issues like social class and the way those with lifelong privilege might treat those without. But this is not a social justice campaign, it’s a brilliant work of fiction that sizzles in places and scorches in others. Character development is spectacularly done; I have had my nose in half a dozen books since I finished reading this one, yet I still think of Blackie, of Tom, of Nancy, of Alex, and oh of course, of Lydia. The ending is bittersweet yet strangely satisfying.

The vocabulary level that makes for such tremendous depth of character and setting also requires a strong facility for the English language on the part of the reader. Although there are no explicit sex scenes, I don’t recommend handing this novel to your love-struck sixteen-year-old as summer reading unless he or she reads at the college level.

I dare you to find a more engaging love story than this one.

Such a special book..It transports the reader to earlier times and social situations.  The characters stay with you.

This novel is set during the post war years of the 1920s, amid rural Northamptonshire in the rapidly expanding town of Evensford. The narrator, a Mr Richardson, in the first flush of adulthood, finds that his love of the countryside is soon surpassed by an ever-growing affection for Lydia, the youngest member of a local aristocratic family. When you are in young and in love, life should be carefree and enchanting, but a feeling of unease is never far from the narrator's thoughts. The newly industrialised Evensford is cramped and grimy; the jobs on offer are uninspiring; and the shy and ungainly Lydia is enigmatic, nested in a family estate on the cusp of decline, surrounded by aged aunts. 

As the story progresses, with the delights of ice skating and dancing providing regular distractions, the reader soon discovers that the fast maturing Lydia is courting a path that threatens destruction for herself and all who are drawn into her world. "She's got you all running round like little boys." With these words, it seems almost inevitable that tragedy will follow - and follow it does. 

H.E. Bates' writing captures the aspirations and travails of youthful love beautifully. Love for Lydia is a novel that tugs at the emotions and pulls the reader through moments of exhilaration and heartache without sentimentality. It is a story told in a manner that will captivate you and have you enthralled from the first page to the last sentence.