Love for Lydia by H. E. Bates

First published: 1952

Type of work: Romantic tragedy

Time of work: 1929-1931

Locale: The fictional town of Evensford in the English Midlands

Principal Characters:

• Richardson, the protagonist and narrator, a young man of nineteen
• Lydia Aspen, the youngest member of a local aristocratic family
• Tom Holland, a young farmer and a friend of Richardson
• Nancy Holland, his sister
• Alex Sanderson, Richardson’s friend, a debonair man-about-town
• Blackie Johnson, a mechanic and taxi driver

The Novel

Love for Lydia is the story of the youngest member of an aristocratic family, Lydia Aspen, and the young men from the small English town of Evensford who fall in love with her. In almost every case, the results are tragic, but the passage of time produces some maturation, and the conclusion holds a promise of future happiness.

The protagonist and narrator is a young reporter who dislikes his job on the local newspaper. He meets the shy, nineteen-year-old Lydia when his boss sends him to unearth a story following the death of one of the elder members of the Aspen family. The two elderly Aspen sisters, Juliana and Bertie, are anxious to ensure that their young niece meets some people of her own age, and they encourage Richardson to take Lydia skating. Lydia quickly emerges from her shyness, and they skate regularly all winter. Richardson falls completely in love with her, and by the summer, the two young people have become lovers; the depth and permanence of Lydia’s affections, however, are not so clearly established.

In the second part of the novel, their horizons expand. At the instigation of the aunts, Richardson invites several of his friends to accompany him and Lydia to a dance: Alex Sanderson, Alex’s mother, Tom Holland, who is a farmer’s boy, and his sister, Nancy. Throughout the autumn and winter, they form a happy little group, dancing regularly, with Lydia’s youthful beauty and engaging innocence as the center of interest—but the tranquillity does not last for long. Alex falls in love with her and becomes jealous of the attention that he thinks she is paying to Blackie Johnson, a young, aggressive, and surly mechanic, who drives them to the dances in their rented car. The tension between Alex and Blackie erupts into violence at a village dance, and they fight.

In the meantime, Richardson becomes jealous when he realizes that he no longer has exclusive claim to Lydia’s affections. It is becoming clear that her seductive charms can also bring danger and distress into the lives of her male admirers. This section of the novel ends with Lydia’s twenty-first birthday party, when Richardson asks her to marry him; her reply is equivocal.

Tragedy strikes twice in part 3. At a dance, Richardson learns that Alex is also contemplating asking Lydia to marry him, and he deliberately misleads Alex into thinking that Lydia intends to marry Blackie. In an argument which develops on their way home after the dance, Alex, who has had more than enough to drink, slips from the running board of the car, falls from the bridge into the river, and drowns.

Richardson is grievously affected by the death of his close friend and spends most of the summer brooding on his own, in an emotional void, until by chance he meets up with Tom Holland, who has acquired some land and set up as a farmer in his own right. Former relationships are reestablished, and Richardson realizes that in his absence, Tom’s affection for Lydia has grown and they plan to marry.

Tom and Lydia, however, are not destined to find fulfillment together. Tom quarrels with his neighbor, an aggressive Presbyterian Scot named McKechnie, over McKechnie’s daughter Phely. McKechnie assumes that the two are to be married, but the innocent Tom has never seen in Phely anything more than a girl who was helping out on his farm. Phely, disappointed, runs away from home, and Tom has to face the threat of violence from McKechnie. Restless and unable to sleep, he goes out in the middle of the night to shoot at a troublesome fox but only succeeds in shooting himself. It is uncertain whether the act is an accident or suicide. Richardson, having already decided to leave Evensford, departs for London.

Part 4 takes up the story two years later, as Richardson returns to Evensford for the first time since the tragedy. He discovers that Lydia has been admitted to a sanatorium. It transpires that after Tom’s death, she went on a yearlong orgy of parties, dancing, and alcohol, which took her to the point of exhaustion. Richardson visits her regularly, over a period of months, yet he finds that his love for her has lessened in the intervening years. Meanwhile, Blackie Johnson, also one of her regular visitors, has become a changed man—courteous, patient, and obviously devoted to Lydia. Richardson finally realizes, however, how lonely Lydia is and how much she needs his love. He accepts her remorse for her earlier flirtatious behavior, and the novel ends as he agrees to accompany her to the coast for a period of convalescence.

The Characters

The character of Lydia Aspen, and the tensions and transformations which she produces in the lives of others, dominates the novel. Lydia is the illegitimate daughter of a fifty-year-old man and a young woman of bad reputation whom Lydia never knew. Starved of affection in childhood, her emotional development was severely retarded, and when Richardson first sees her, he estimates her age to be at least four years younger than it really is. She is withdrawn, thin, and physically awkward. Yet, as Richardson gradually realizes, “there was something molten underneath it all.” She soon shows herself to be impatient, forthright, strong-willed, and impulsive, with the inevitable self-centeredness of the emotionally immature. She wants and expects to get her own way and learns quickly how to exert her charm to this end. Few people in the novel know how to say no to her. She even has an almost magical power to soothe the uncouth and belligerent Blackie Johnson and eventually to subdue him totally.

Her sudden entry into a new and exciting social world is too quick, however, for her to acquire a sense of caution regarding the intense feelings that she arouses in others. Sometimes she seems curiously indifferent to the effects of her words and actions. She watches the fight between Alex and Blackie with a kind of detached and fascinated calmness, apparently unaware that she, at least in part, is the cause of it. Richardson realizes, in one of his most acute moments of insight, that Lydia, as she grows to maturity, is one of those people who “think less and less and less. Thought is driven out by a growing automatism of instinct and feeling and blood . . . blood drives and governs and pushes them along.”

Richardson, the narrator, is the most interesting of the young men in the novel. There is a strong autobiographical element in the author’s portrayal of him. Like H. E. Bates, Richardson comes from a respectable working-class background; he, too, is intelligent and well read, and his unhappiness as a reporter reflects Bates’s own dislike of the job he held as a young man on the Northamptonshire Chronicle.

Diffident and shy (“That’s what you’ve got to get over,” his employer Bretherton yells at him), Richardson, in his naivete, is quite unprepared for his encounter with Lydia. Transported into a happiness which he has never known before, his inexperience makes him acutely vulnerable and unable to meet the tests which such an intense involvement with another human being must inevitably place before him. He reveals some unpleasing qualities—jealousy, childishness, sarcasm—and he tends to retreat into himself, or run away, when crises occur. Eventually, he is forced to come to terms with the changing phases that love goes through over a period of time, and this brings him to a new maturity.

Other characters are competently drawn but unexceptional, lacking in complexity and showing little growth or change throughout the novel. Alex, the well-to-do, snappily dressed man-about-town, is a contrast to the more reflective Richardson. The simple good nature of Nancy Holland, the down-to-earth country girl, is in marked contrast to the flirtatious Lydia. Richardson treats Nancy with less than compassion, however, finding her as bland as a drink of milk, “fresh and clean and smooth, neither warm nor cool, neither flat nor exciting.” She is far more eager for a serious relationship with him than he will ever be with her.

Critical Context

For forty-five years following the publication of his first novel, The Two Sisters (1926), H. E. Bates was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and novellas. His work was well received, both by critics and by the general reading public, during the period before World War II, but his critical reputation declined rapidly in the postwar years, although his commercial success continued. His critics believed that he had abandoned literary quality for the more easily produced sensationalism of the popular novel.

Love for Lydia, however, along with The Feast of July (1954), marked a return to the creative freshness of Bates’s prewar works. Indeed, Love for Lydia has been acclaimed as one of the finest of his twenty-three novels and gained especial popularity when adapted for television in the 1970’s. It has the virtues which characterize the best of Bates’s work: simplicity and directness of style, straightforward development of plot (Bates was not an innovator and his work reflects little of the experimental qualities of much twentieth century fiction), and effective use of setting, particularly in his subtle evocations of the changing cycles of nature. In terms of literary antecedents and influences, he is probably closest to Joseph Conrad (whom Bates acknowledged as a major influence on The Two Sisters) and Thomas Hardy, a writer whom Bates professed to dislike but whose stories of the tragedies of rural characters exposed to a harsh fate often parallel Bates’s own.

Bibliography

Atlantic Monthly. Review. CXCI (February, 1953), p. 83.

Cahoon, Herbert. Review in Library Journal. LXXVIII (January 1, 1953), p. 53.

Morgan, Constance. Review in Saturday Review. XXXVI (January 17, 1953), p. 14.

Sullivan, Richard. Review in The New York Times. XXX (January 18, 1953), p. 5.

Vanatta, Dennis. H. E. Bates, 1983.