Love for Lydia (The great writers library) [Hardcover]

I read this as a teenager and totally fell in love with the story. I still have the book but have never quite dared to re-read it in case it's not as wonderful as I remember!

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 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 chic-littish melodrama. I think I've persuaded myself I must re-read it immediately!

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, on a journalistic assignment. 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.

I bought the book because I loved the TV adaptation in the 70 s. Enjoying H E Bates style. Will probably purchase the dvd now. Gently romantic.