Love for Lydia
Authors: H.E. Bates
H. E. Bates
To Laurence
The âI' of this story is purely fictitious, as are the characters he describes
Introduction
If, as a smitten fifteen year old, I'd have known that one day I would be asked to write an introduction to
Love for Lydia
, my excitement would have known no limits. It was, and remains, one of my favourite novels.
This is a work that cannot fail to intrigue, delight and influence; and, if caught at the right time, to make its mark on the mind. It is also one that, read as a teenager trying to write, was influential to me as a novelist in ways I have only just fathomed. Characters who are not what they seem have always fascinated me, and I now wonder whether the contradictory Lydia wormed her way into my psyche without me realising. Anyone who is reading the novel for the first time is to be envied.
Love for Lydia
is so exquisitely written, so accurate on both the glorious and dangerous aspects of obsessive love, and so precise in its portrait of a era and place, it seems to me to be timeless. I re-read it last summer for the first time in years, and I was once more enchanted and addicted. I also saw the character of Lydia in a very different light.
The narrator, Richardson, is a local reporter in the small Northamptonshire town of Evensford, based on H. E. Bates's own Rushden.
Love for Lydia
is, by Bates's own description, his most autobiographical work, and his own favourite among his Northamptonshire novels. His portrait of the leather factories, the alleys and cramped houses, and their contrasting surroundings of lush English countryside, are breathtaking. It's those scenes, depicted with such extraordinary lyrical powers, that have lasted in my mind.
Once Richardson is dispatched to the Hall and meets Lydia, a fatherless aristocrat sent to live with old aunts, she intrigues both him and the reader. This is where reading the novel in both youth and adulthood makes for very different experiences. Lydia's ostensible timidity and gawkiness are supremely identifiable with as a teenager. To me, it meant that we shy, awkward girls who said nothing and hid our faces behind our hair could one day transform ourselves into man-slaying minxes. We could, like Miss Aspen, progress to become consummate flirts, party girls loved by all men, even heiresses. What could possibly be better?
Lydia is the central focus of the novel, as Richardson himself recedes and becomes largely an observer. As she pushes him away, we see how far he â and other men â will go for her love. Here is a woman framed by the beauty of her setting, in a fashion reminiscent of Hardy. As a fifteen-year-old, I considered the siren Lydia a marvellous role model: an exemplar of the hair-tossing adult life that lay ahead. But then Emily Brontë's Heathcliff appeared to be the ultimate romantic hero instead of a wife-battering sadist, and George Eliot's Dorothea was a touch dull, instead of a woman of high intelligence and integrity.
On the contrary, what strikes me now is Lydia's dangerous narcissism. Her charisma, her wilful and at times histrionic nature wreak havoc until her self-serving actions can seem quite monstrous. The gradual realisation that she is fickle, heartless in some ways, and a tireless flirt, makes the novel a fascinating study of a personality type. As more men join her group of admirers, we get a sense of both her power, and of the strength of friendship clinging on through the blows of love and lust. Where I once found her enchanting, I now find her equally tiresome, but the truth is, of course, that she is both.
This is a novel of nuances, not of absolutes, and Lydia is flawed yet ultimately comes into her own. There is soul under the flapper's artifice, and this only emerges when she makes her eventual choice. The novel shows that wildness is romanticised by our culture, but ultimately selfish.
The themes of decaying aristocracy and of class differences â between Richardson and friends, Lydia, and Blackie â are all well handled, while that sense of youth wanting more than their parents: circumscribed by setting and circumstances, but determined to have better and to tell authority figures where to go, is one that plucks at the young reader's sympathies.
When I first read
Love for Lydia
, Young Adult literature didn't exist: there was literature for children and for adults. But there were novels, like this one, that spoke to youth. So Alain-Fournier, Rosamond Lehmann, Rumer Godden, Laurie Lee, and F. Scott Fitzgerald could all be delighted in, both for their fine prose, and for their romanticism. The belief in love being one's life's work, transcending all, making a character noble even, is what the teenage heart responds to, and it was this that made me read and then re-read
Love for Lydia
in those years.
The men in Lydia's life are not just dupes. There is something touching about Blackie the chauffeur's consistency and pride, and the tragedies that unfold are unforgettable. The novel appears to be a slow burn, beautifully written and as leisurely as the seasons it describes, but then its twists and surprises are all the more powerful. As a reader, I didn't see tragedy coming, and it was all the more effective for it.
When the television adaptation was broadcast, I found it tremendously exciting, as though allowed a peek into adult life. âThat young man will go far,' said my mother of a novice Jeremy Irons. I still have my copy of the novel with the actress Mel Martin on the cover.
Reading it now, I feel strangely rejuvenated. The novel really does capture so many of the emotions of young love with startling accuracy, and the prose continues to take my breath away. When Bates writes of âgolden clarified sunlight' or âthe long pale twilight when the air was green with young leaves and the acid of new grass,' I am lulled into a sense of peace, a simple revelling in his lyricism.
Unusually for a male writer of his generation, Bates does nothing to upset later feminist sensibilities. Lydia could all so easily be an Eve or a Magdalen poisoning bucolic innocence, yet the men's foolishness is just as obvious as her manipulations, and no fingers are pointed. Above all, the novel leaves the reader with a sense of the very significant differences between thrilling yet tormenting romance, and mature love. In Lydia and Richardson's case, one is not possible without the other, and the resolution is as convincing as it is rewarding.
The novel should be better known: it is a finer, more realised work than the more famous
The Darling Buds of May
, and I'm a lifelong admirer. If youth is wasted on the young, at least it can be revisited in the imagination.
Love for Lydia
plunges us into its midst and it's hard to leave.
Joanna Briscoe, 2016
My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel
The Darling Buds of May
, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.
My grandfather's short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them â especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets â a new lease of life.
There are hundreds of stories to discover and rediscover, from H. E. Bates's most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as
The Mill
and
Dulcima
, to little, unknown gems such as âThe Waddler', which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the
Guardian
in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or âCastle in the Air', a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.
If you would like to know more about my grandfather's work I encourage you to visit the
H.E. Bates Companion
â a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates's publications, can be found. I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.
Â
Tim Bates, 2015
Â
We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates's short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes â you can sign up to the H. E. Bates's mailing list
here
. When you sign up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.
Chapter One
After the death of their elder brother the two Aspen sisters came back to Evensford at the end of February, driving in the enormous brown coachwork Daimler with the gilt monograms on the doors, through a sudden fall of snow.
Across the valley the floods of January, frozen to wide lakes of ice, were cut into enormous rectangular patterns by black hedgerows that lay like a wreckage of logs washed down on the broken river. A hard dark wind blew straight across the ice from the north-east, beating in at that end of the town where for a few hundred yards the High Street runs straight, past what is now Johnson's car-wrecking yard, under the railway arches, and then between the high causeways that make it like a dry canal. It was so cold that solid ice seemed to be whipped up from the valley on the wind, to explode into whirlwinds of harsh and bitter dust that pranced about in stinging clouds. Ice formed everywhere in dry black pools, polished in sheltered places, ruckled with dark waves at street corners or on sloping gutters where wind had flurried the last falls of rain.
Frost had begun in the third week of January, and from that date until the beginning of April it did not leave us for a day. All the time the same dark wind came with it, blowing bitterly and savagely over long flat meadows of frozen floods. There was no snow with it until the afternoon the Aspen sisters came back; and then it began to fall lightly, in sudden flusters, no more than vapour, and then gritty and larger, like grains of rice.
It began falling almost exactly at the moment the heavy brown Daimler drove past the old Succoth chapel, with its frozen steps like a waterfall of chipped glass, opposite the
branch offices of
The County Examiner
, where the windows were partly glazed over with a pattern of starry fern. It came suddenly on a darkened whirl of wind that flowered into whiteness. The wind seemed to twist violently in the air and snatch from nowhere the snow that was like white vapour, catching the Daimler broadside at the same time. Through the windows of
The Examiner
, where I stood nursing the wrist I had sprained while skating, I saw the car shudder and swerve and twist itself into a skid and then out again. From a confusion of leopard rugs on the back seat the younger Miss Aspen, Juliana, seemed to shudder too and was swung forward, snatching at the silken window cord with her right hand. The elder one, Bertie, bounced like a rosy dumpling. They were still both in black. But round the neck of the younger one was pinned a violet woollen scarf, as if she had caught a cold, and it was when she jolted forward, clutching the scarf with one hand and the window cord with the other, that I saw Elliot Aspen's daughter sitting there, between her aunts, for the first time.